Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Governor Corruptocrat, a/k/a Andrew Cuomo, is passing out other people’s money in the form of grants for pet projects while proposing to ban fracking.

Is there any more despicably demagogic politician than Governor Corruptocrat? The competition just within New York is admittedly fierce but Andrew Cuomo wins hands down. He’s now come out with a proposed permanent fracking ban that offers nothing new other than a complete surrender to the NRDC gang. Worse, it makes a deceitful claim the Southern Tier is a flowering green energy garden producing thousands of jobs that have revived its economy when nothing could be further from the truth.

Governor Corruptocrat has put out a news release bragging on a decision to push for a permanent fracking ban in New York. It’s the same package of lies used in 2014, nicely tied up in red bow purchased by the effete snobs in Manhattan and Ithaca who have a bull ring in his nose. Walter Hang, the Park and Rockefeller $2 million man, is out with a new statistical claim to provide some cover, but it’s the same old thing; a disingenuous justification for a demagogic policy.

There is one thing different, though, and it’s outrageous. It’s the claim the Southern Tier isn’t suffering but, rather, is prospering due to a green energy boom:

In the wake of the ban, the clean energy ecosystem in the Southern Tier has grown rapidly over the last five years, fueled by a variety of programs and resources. New companies have sprouted in the Southern Tier with innovations in a wide variety of clean energy sectors, supporting over 4,100 jobs as of 2017. Examples of this industry density include the success of 76West Clean Energy Competition, new business like Imperium3, Sungeel, and Micatu locating in the ST, and the most recent spotlight on the region’s clean energy expertise with the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Binghamton University’s Stan Whittingham. These efforts have been bolstered by Southern Tier Soaring, the URI-winning strategic plan developed by the Southern Tier Regional Economic Development Council.

This is Governor Corruptocrat giving the Heisman to the Southern Tier, or worse. It is Andrew Cuomo saying “take those crumbs you rural deadbeats and ingrates and you’d better like them.”

Let’s dissect the paragraph a bit, in fact, starting the “76West Clean Energy Competition.” Like Presidents who send their Vice-Presidents abroad to do funerals duty, Governor Corruptocrat sent Lt. Governor Hochul into the Southern Tier last year to give away your money, first extracted from ratepayers or taxpayers, to finance little Buffalo Billion government rent heists in your backyard. And, once again, you’ll be happy about it, of course, or else. Watch the following video of the “awards” if you have the stomach for it:

These awards are a sham and the individual companies Governor Corruptocrat cites as examples of green energy success in the Southern Tier are simply folks who have received government handouts of your money if you’re a New York State resident.

Let’s take Imperium3, for instance. It’s listed by the Governor in his news release as one of his successes. Its partner company, C4V, grabbed $500,000 in the 2017 version of the 76West Clean Energy Competition, according to this new release from February, 2018. It bragged its new Endicott factory to manufacture lithium-ion batteries was coming sooner rather than later; in three to five months, in fact, which meant by August, 2018 at the latest, rather than late 2019 as originally planned. Today, January 24, 2020, it’s still listed as project that will be located in Endicott. But, that’s not the most interesting part.

No, here’s what was cited in the new release as the reason the Imperium3 plant that still isn’t open was supposed to be opened earlier than expected. It has to do with another lithium-ion battery plant in North Carolina (emphasis added).

The manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries will be coming to the Southern Tier a bit earlier than expected, thanks to a quick-thinking purchase by a company in the Binghamton Start-Up Suite incubator.

Imperium3, the battery development consortium that prompted Gov. Andrew Cuomo to visit the region last fall, recently closed a deal for industrial manufacturing machinery from a shuttered North Carolina factory.

The consortium focuses on the research, development and manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, which can provide more power than traditional batteries because of an improved chemical composition. Imperium3 is owned by a consortium that includes Charge CCCV (C4V), founded by former postdoctoral researcher Shailesh Upreti on the Binghamton University campus in 2014.

C4V was an early entrant into the Binghamton Start-Up NY program at the Start-Up Suite incubator and is also a member of the Southern Tier Clean Energy Incubator (SCI), part of the Binghamton Incubator Program (BiP), which operates the Start-Up Suites and the Koffman Incubator…

Imperium3 had initially planned to build a factory at Endicott’s Huron campus by the end of 2019, bringing more than 200 jobs to the area. That date has now been moved up, after the consortium snagged $200 million of machinery and assets in a bankruptcy auction. The price? Just $5 million. That means the $140 million investment cost Imperium3 had estimated will likely be much lower…

Last summer, C4V won $500,000 in 76 West’s Clean Energy Competition, a state-operated program that rewards companies promising to bring clean energy services and jobs specifically to the Southern Tier region.

Imperium3 is now in the process of hiring contractors to move the machinery more than 600 miles its Concord, North Carolina factory. Once that’s done, Endicott’s first lithium-ion factory will be finished in three to five months.

That plant was owned by Alevo and written up excitedly in Forbes in May, 2016:

Assuming the projects and financing materialize, Alevo is ready to move quickly. The company currently has one production line that is fairly well automated and capable of producing 600 MW and 300 MWh annually for both the utility-scale projects as well as smaller commercial and industrial customer installations.

So the building blocks appear to be in place. The big question now is whether or not there is any technology risk to their relatively new battery chemistry, and whether the market wants what Alevo has in sufficient quantities to make this a profitable business. The company thinks it has what it takes to win in this new and growing industry and that it can compete…

Well, it turns out it couldn’t, as we learn from this Charlotte Business Journal article:

The remaining assets of Alevo Manufacturing in Concord have been auctioned off for $5 million, with the apparent winner being a consortium that is building a battery storage production plant in [New York].

The 290-worker Concord site closed down suddenly in August when the manufacturer, owned by the Swiss Alevo Group, and its companion company Alevo USA announced they were filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. On Wednesday, a bankruptcy judge in the U.S. Middle District of North Carolina converted the case to a Chapter 7 liquidation…

The filing does not name the buyer. But on Feb. 8, the Australian company Magnis Resources Limited reported it was the winning bidder in an auction to buy equipment from a North Carolina manufacturing plant for $5 million.

Magnis is a one-third owner of the Imperium 3, a New York-based consortium that is building a plant in [New York], designed to eventually produce 15 gigawatt-hours worth of lithium-ion batteries annually. Initial production is slated to start next year, with the plant able at produce about one gigawatt-hour of storage annually.

Moving the assets to New York means there is no chance that the Concord facility — which opened to great fanfare in 2014 with projections of 500 jobs by 2015 — will reopen as a battery plant.

So, Governor Corruptocrat is using your money to finance a company picking up the remnants of a similar operation that failed in less than two years in one of the most business-friendly states in the union. It’ll make it in New York, he promises and you will be pleased because it’s green, it’s good for his image and the folks in Manhattan and the NRDC gang like it.

There’s more, but you get the picture; it’s all more green eggs and scam from the master scammer, Governor Corruptocrat. Meanwhile, the Southern Tier falls further and further behind. Here are the latest real GDP numbers for the two most prominent gas-producing Pennsylvania Northern Tier Counties of Bradford and Susquehanna, compared to the Binghamton-Elmira region of New York’s Southern Tier (Broome, Tioga and Chemung Counties). They directly adjoin and couldn’t be more different:

Read the numbers and weep. Governor Corruptocrat is lying to you, if you’re from the Southern Tier, and he doesn’t give a damn if you know it because he couldn’t care less about you. Two rural counties in Pennsylvania with gas are growing more than five times as fast as their neighbors to the north in the Southern Tier and, even more incredibly, have added more than three times as much to their GDP, despite the New York side having two cities and being the home of famed manufacturers such as IBM.

The Southern Tier is barely surviving, even during the best economy our nation has ever had. Governor Corruptocrat has put you on the slow road to Venezuela. Save yourselves and move to Pennsylvania or get off your asses and sue the bastard! Forget trying to win public opinion and convince New York’s rulers to do the right thing. There’s no convincing rulers who merely desire power; ideas, facts and logic are anathema to them.

Persuasion is out the window and patience should be right behind. Forget waiting for Cuomo to retire or be beaten. He’ll only be replaced by someone worse or someone so milquetoast they’re just as bad. New York has gone over the edge, dominated by ignorant urban voters who, to quote the great Ricky Gervais, with emphasis, “know nothing.” Your only hope, if you’re from the Southern Tier, is to adopt the fractivist playbook and sue in Federal Court for the takings involved. Get on with it for crying out loud! Dispense with rationality yourselves and go on the attack.