weather station update

Queens hydro power

02 Aug 2026

Running a small weather station presents many opportunities to indulge in a particular fantasy of how software and data should work: for the small cost of a few sensors and a rented server, I can record weather data that has a very specific terroir…it comes from a specific and real place in Queens! I can store that data and do anything with it forever, without worrying about some provider or API going down or going out of business.

I’ve come to treat this vision of data provenance as a creative constraint: I generally only put weather data on Big Boy Weather where I know where it comes from, or had a hand in producing it. This constraint can indeed be quite limiting: many types of weather forecast depend on radars or high altitude balloon readings that I don’t have the means to produce myself, and so Big Boy Weather is unlikely to ever provide accurate 5-day weather forecasts or track hurricanes.

There’s been a recent development in Queens for which I’m making an exception to this general rule: the Champlain Hudson Power Express is a long range power line connecting Canadian hydro power from dams in Québec that was recently connected to the ConEd power substation on the north coast of Astoria, Queens (about 2 miles or so away from Big Boy Weather). It’s normally not possible to say for certain whether or not any given electron was produced by a particular energy source like the Champlain Hudson Power Express: energy producers send electricity into a large grid that moves electrons to wherever they can be consumed right now. So it’s typically tricky to answer questions about how much of NYC’s energy needs are provided by any given non-fossil-fuel energy source: even where we build wind/solar/hydro/nuclear/battery energy, the energy produced tends to be diffused into the energy grid in a way that makes it hard to track except where you’re looking across the entire energy grid of New York.

This new Queens hydro connection is different: the power station it connects to in Astoria is close to the geographic center of New York City, and so we can reasonably assume all of those hydro power electrons are being used within the city. This electron (& data) Queens-locality fits nicely with the broader ethos of Big Boy Weather: I want to know where the data is coming from geographically, and here I can! And so I wrote a script that scrapes total NYC energy consumption along-side Queens hydro energy generation from the NY state energy grid operator every 5 minutes. Those data are rendered as a tiny chart with the last two hour’s of energy use in brown and Queens hydro energy production in blue. Here’s the live graph:

As of writing, there’s actually no Queens hydro energy being produced, and so the chart is all brown: the power line has been turned on and off over the course of July/August 2026 due to ongoing technical issues. The line is meant to deliver a stable 1250 megawatts worth of hydro power, which on a low energy day would provide around 15% of NYC’s energy usage (pretty good!). Over the past weeks, I’ve instead observed 600mW, 100mW, and 0mW at different times of day; I assume they’re doing a lot of flipping on and off the big lightswitch at some point between Queens and Québec. As with other Big Boy Weather offerings, I’m recording this temporal data in the event that this fluctuation becomes interesting over time, and also to possibly try to correlate changes in temperature/humidity with NYC-wide energy usage generally.