NYers Step Up, Unplug To Avoid Heat Wave Power Outage

NEW YORK CITY — New Yorkers helped avert a dangerous mass power outage by heeding a call to cut back on their electricity usage during record-setting heat, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

Power consumption dropped 476 megawatts two hours after an alert buzzed across phones citywide asking households and businesses to limit energy usage, de Blasio said.

Four hours later, it fell 1,062 megawatts, he said.

"Over a thousand megawatt drop — that's enough energy to power over a million single-family homes, to give you a perspective," de Blasio said Thursday. "What this says is that New Yorkers heard the alert. They understood that it was in their interest, in everyone else’s interest to immediately power down everything they could. They went and did it immediately and saved us from the danger of power outages."

Wednesday's temperatures fell just shy of 100 degrees across the city. LaGuardia Airport experienced a record-breaking 98-degree temperature that day, according to the National Weather Service.

Newark and LaGuardia have both broken record high temperatures for 6/30. LaGuardia reached 98 while Newark hit 101! This is the second day in a row that these sites have tied or broken record highs. #NYwx #NJwx
— NWS New York NY (@NWSNewYorkNY) June 30, 2021

The heat wave sent sweaty New Yorkers indoors to crank up their air conditioning.

But the power usage strained ConEdison's system to the "brink," de Blasio said.

Localized outages had already struck Williamsburg and parts of Queens when the mayor decided to hold a news conference and send out an alert to tell New Yorkers to scale back their power use.

They did.

The decline was vividly captured in a Bloomberg graph highlighted by Ben Furnas, the city's sustainability director.

"Striking evidence that New Yorkers really came together yesterday to avoid a much worse set of outages," he tweeted about the graph's sharp decline.