Good morning. It’s Friday, and it’s the first day of spring. Today we’ll look at a 339-mile transmission line that will bring Canadian hydropower to New York City for the first time. We’ll also find out about plans to retire subway cars that have been carrying passengers longer than half of the city’s population has been alive.
Oil jumped as high as $118 a barrel on Thursday as the war in the Middle East continued and a global energy crisis deepened.
If you heat your home, you’re already feeling the shocks: A gallon of heating oil now costs $5.64, on average. That is 10 cents a gallon more than last week and $1.64 a gallon more than a year ago, according to New York State data.
If you have a car, the increases have been steeper. The average price in New York City is $3.79, 81 cents a gallon more than a month ago and 22 cents more than just last week, according to AAA.
The uncertainty about oil and natural gas prices comes as a different form of power for electricity is about to arrive in New York City — hydropower.
An underground transmission line called the Champlain Hudson Power Express will go online soon, running for 339 miles from Canada. The president and chief executive of Hydro-Québec, a Canadian state-owned utility that will supply the power that courses through the line, once called it “an umbilical cord” between Queens and dams in far corners of Quebec.
Its promise is significant. It can deliver up to 20 percent of the city’s power needs, according to Transmission Developers, the company that built it. That will matter if New York faces a shortfall from other power sources as soon as next summer. And New York has been more dependent on fossil fuel in the years since the Indian Point nuclear plant was shut down.
My colleague Hilary Howard writes that the hydropower project was designed to help New York meet targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions set by an ambitious state law passed in 2019. The clock is running: New York has just four years to boost the share of electricity that is generated from wind, water and sun to 70 percent, from less than 30 percent in 2021.
The transmission line is a renewable energy win for Gov. Kathy Hochul, who announced support for the $6 billion project less than a month after she was sworn into office five years ago. At the time she said it would “help us turn the page on New York City’s longstanding dependence on fossil fuels.” She also said it would bring “the promise of cleaner air and a healthier future.”
Its builders have managed the engineering feat of connecting with the city. Con Edison says that more than three miles of underground circuitry had to be added, along with 10 new manholes. Con Edison customers will not pay for the construction to connect the transmission line to the city. That expense is typically covered by the developer.
There may be concerns about how much power Quebec can supply. Massachusetts recently introduced a similar but shorter transmission line from Canada and had to go back to fossil fuel dependence for a few days during a cold snap in January — Quebec needed all the hydropower for itself. It had already been importing electricity generated with natural gas and oil from other provinces in Canada and the United States.
That made the environmental benefits of shipping out hydropower “questionable,” according to Robert McCullough, the principal of McCullough Research, an energy consulting firm in Portland, Ore., who said a temporary hydro shutdown could happen just as easily in New York City.
Officials of Hydro-Québec note that there is flexibility, with looser terms for how much power must be sent to New York in the winter, when Quebec faces higher demand. That could help New York in the summer, when air-conditioning is going full blast. Hydro-Québec also says that its 30 reservoirs can make it through a drought that is now in its third year. But McCullough said that less water meant less energy production, and the drought could continue into a fourth year.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day with temperatures around 57. Rain is expected in the afternoon. Tonight will be mostly cloudy with rain likely and a low around 46.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended (Eid al-Fitr).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It is inhumane and takes advantage of us and our wages.” Xue Zhen, a home health aide who joined a demonstration at City Hall to press the City Council to pass a law that would all but end 24-hour shifts.
The latest New York news
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A cautious first step: Mayor Zohran Mamdani created the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, a pared-down version of his campaign pledge to overhaul the city’s response to mental health emergencies, and appointed Renita Francois, a former city official, to lead the office as deputy mayor for community safety.
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Lewd social media posts: Facebook posts by Peter Chatzky, a tech executive, show a penchant for crude jokes that could undermine his image as a businessman and a progressive — and a top contender for the Democratic nomination to unseat Representative Mike Lawler in a Hudson Valley district.
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Langston Hughes’s Harlem brownstone: The National Trust for Historic Preservation will undertake a meticulous restoration of the timeworn exterior of the brownstone where the famous poet lived the last 20 years of his life.
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A neighborhood that’s evolving subtly: Gramercy Park was once an elegantly sedentary white-glove neighborhood with limited turnover. But it’s getting a vibe shift with ultraluxury residential condominiums that are setting record prices.
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” Jeffery C. Mays talks with The Times’s East Africa bureau chief, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, about how Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s father went from being a Ugandan exile to shaping debates on Israel, Gaza and New York politics. The program airs on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sunday.
M.T.A. looks to replace subway cars from the 1980s
Maybe you feel nostalgic for the ’80s, when big hair and shoulder pads were in, the moonwalk caught on, Ronald Reagan was president and Edward I. Koch was mayor.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority feels no such nostalgia. It is planning to replace 1,140 subway cars that have been carrying passengers on the Nos. 1, 3 and 6 lines since then. It is also looking at ordering another 1,250 cars for the Nos. 2, 4 and 5 lines.
The cars that are being replaced — silver, with orange and yellow seats — were billed as having graffiti-resistant stainless steel bodies when they arrived, a change from subway cars that had been decorated or desecrated, depending on your point of view. But now those cars are past or near the end of their expected life spans. They break down every 89,000 miles, on average. The new cars, expected in the 2030s, could travel more than twice that far before having problems.
Jessie Lazarus, the transit agency’s chief of rolling stock, told my colleague Stefanos Chen that the new cars, called R262s, will have an updated brake system and the possibility of more “open gangway” designs — trains in which passengers can walk from one car to another and another without having to slide open doors between the cars.
She said the new cars would also have clearer audio systems, something that generations of passengers have wished for as they rolled their eyes about announcements they could not understand.
The total price of the order won’t be known until transit officials review proposals from manufacturers, but the agency has committed $11 billion through 2029 for the purchase of new subway and commuter railroad cars. Proposals are due in September, and a contract is expected to be awarded by early 2028, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.
The transit agency can pay for the new trains under a $68 billion capital plan that Hochul approved last year. It represents the agency’s largest-ever five-year budget to bolster the region’s mass transit systems, and Lazarus said the order for the new cars would be the single biggest that the M.T.A. had ever placed.
The new train plans are the latest effort by the M.T.A. to reinvigorate the century-old system, at a rare moment when the agency is flush with cash. The authority is installing a number of high-tech fare gates in places where fare evasion has been a major concern. It is also adding elevators and other accessibility features at dozens of the city’s 472 subway stations.
METROPOLITAN diary
Chirping
Dear Diary:
I returned to New York to visit for the first time after having moved to Spain.
Sitting outside my former go-to coffee shop on the Upper West Side, I saw two sparrows on the sidewalk chirping and an older woman walking toward them quickly.
“Stop fighting!” she yelled.
— Sergii Pershyn
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post How a Power Line From Canada Could Be a New York Lifeline appeared first on New York Times.
