I · How a tide turns a turbine
If you pay a Con Edison bill in any of the five boroughs, a quiet part of that bill reflects geography: New York City sits at the far end of long wires, and most of the power that reaches your meter comes from somewhere else. The city has spent years asking a stubborn question. Can it make more of its own electricity inside its own limits, where there is almost no room left to build anything new?
One answer has been sitting underwater in the East River, in the fast channel between Roosevelt Island and Queens, for the better part of two decades. The East River is not really a river. It is a tidal strait, a saltwater channel that connects New York Harbor to Long Island Sound, so twice a day a large mass of water pushes through it one direction, then reverses. Verdant Power, a company that has worked this stretch of water since the mid-2000s, placed turbines on the riverbed that spin with that flow, the way a wind turbine spins in moving air, and feed the result into the local grid.
II · What the pilot actually measured
Verdant ran the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project, known as RITE, under a pilot license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, the federal agency that licenses hydropower). In October 2020 the company deployed its TriFrame, a mount that holds three turbines on the river bottom and was built to make installation and retrieval cheaper. An earlier demonstration phase, running roughly from 2006 to 2008, connected turbines to a supermarket and a parking garage on Roosevelt Island, which is the kind of small, real load that tells you the machinery works before anyone talks about scale.
The honest number is that the power delivered so far has been small, on the order of tens of kilowatts at a time rather than the megawatts a power plant pushes out, and the turbines have run in test campaigns rather than continuously. That is what a pilot is for. Whether tidal power in the East River can ever grow past a demonstration depends on cost per turbine, on how the saltwater and debris treat the equipment over years, and on whether anyone funds a larger array, and none of those answers is settled.
III · Why in-city power is the hard part
New York City is its own electrical island in the grid operator's map. The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO, the nonprofit that runs the state's bulk power grid) treats the five boroughs as Zone J, an in-city load zone that for reliability reasons has to generate or import a set share of its own power close to home. That rule is why the city still leans on older in-city plants, including gas peaker plants (units that run mainly on the hottest, highest-demand days), and why any new local resource gets a close look.
Tidal power has one quality those plants and even rooftop solar lack: it is predictable, because the tides run on a clock set by the moon, not the weather. The catch is size. The big additions to the city's supply this decade are a long transmission line bringing Canadian hydropower down to Queens, expected to begin service around 2026 per the developer, and offshore wind staged through the working waterfront. Next to those, a riverbed array is a small, local complement at best, not a replacement, and this desk would not sell it as more.
IV · Worth watching this month
1. Watch FERC's eLibrary for any new filings in the RITE pilot docket, which is the public record of what Verdant reports and what the agency asks, and is routine housekeeping most months rather than big news.
2. Watch Verdant Power's own project page for word of any new deployment or a move past the pilot stage, which would be the signal that actually matters.
3. Watch NYISO's in-city reliability reports for how tight Zone J supply looks heading into winter, the backdrop against which every local resource is judged.
4. Watch for milestones on the Canadian hydropower transmission line into Queens, since its start date, hedged around 2026, reshapes how much in-city generation the city still needs.