Once many small rivers in the northeastern United States had pocket hydropower stations that supplied clean, easy to tap hydroelectric power to municipalities and local industries. These were largely phased out and supplanted by large dams and by monolithic power authorities in the 1950's & 60's.Most of these stations are no more but a few small facilities have been restored and there is great interest putting the machinery back in some of the old stone power-plant buildings and spillways.

Photo by Kit Latham: Housatonic River, MassachusettsNew York City on the other hand is trying out a tidal electric installation on the bottom of a river. Verdant Power, a developer of free-flow turbine systems recently began installing its new kinetic hydropower plant in New York City's East River. The East River is a tidal estuary that runs right by Manhattan through the middle of New York City. Tides flow through the river which connects New York harbor with Long Island Sound and can sometimes run in excess of 8 knots, fast enough to roll good sized boulders along the bottom of the river according to some coast guard personnel. The Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project (RITE) seeks to harness the potential kinetic energy of the river's motion by installing free-flow hydopower turbines on the riverbed. These turbines resemble smaller versions of wind turbines often seen on land using the flow of water instead of air to generate energy potential.

The first two of the six turbines were deployed on December 11th and 12th of 2006, the remaining four turbines will be installed in the first part of April for an 18 months test. One of the initial turbines has a dynamometer to measure load factors and the other turbine contains a power generation system.According to Trey Taylor at Verdant Technologies the turbines are being put through their operational paces in their first 5 weeks with following results:• 40 days of continuous operation (about 155 tides)
• 100% turbine availability during that period.
• reached or exceeded every performance specification
• world's first grid-connected power without any switching or power-quality problems
• generated power to the grid 77% of the time
• performed equally well in both tide directions, another first
• average power output during tidal generation periods of 14.5 kW
• average energy production of 270 kWh/day = 8.1MWh/month = 97 MWh/yr
• generated a total of over 10 MWh

This underwater turbine farm is completely submerged but essentially located directly in front of the United Nations Building, not a bad location for the first test of its kind in the United States.