Not to mention that all New York power plants, including Moses Saunders, are connected to a massive electrical highway that runs straight to New York City.

The lines from Moses Saunders to the plant are direct. You can even see them on google maps if you zoom in and follow them.

You can't just suddenly push more power through the same lines.

The Moses Saunders dam is connected to the NYISO transmission network. The power system in New York is designed to move power north to south, west to east (lines tend to be symmetric in theory but a good model is that the city is the load). You can look at a price map of New York State and see that. Power from the dam can go from it to anywhere else in New York (or the eastern interconnect) at the cost of transmission losses and tolling. Drawing power directly from a hydro plant doesn’t make that power green because, insofar as the plant could supply electricity to the rest of the grid, it means your power usage has the same environmental impact as the average unit of electricity on the grid at that time. The only thing it does is reduce your cost.

The amount of load that is allocated to the Alcoa facility has been negotiated and fixed into contracts and capex has been spent to build out the infrastructure for that. It isn't like you can just flip a switch and direct the power to the NYISO.

> at the cost of transmission losses and tolling

... a key point that I feel you're glossing over.

Yes you can flip a switch and direct the power elsewhere, that is what switching yards do. The plant might have a supply contract with Alcoa but if Alcoa doesn’t use the supply they contracted for you they don’t have to throw the power away. Usually those agreements have take or pay provisions which require the buyer to pay regardless of whether they take the power. If they don’t take the power the generator is free to sell it on.

Transmission losses are not nothing but they are not huge. Maybe 2% to New York (it isn’t they far). Maybe 5% total if you include distribution.

Edit: Follow the lines out of the plant, at 44.978432, -74.797925 they split.

This does make me wonder how difficult it is to raise the voltage on the same lines by changing transformers.

You might need to separate the lines more (and need bigger insulators), but I wonder how much of this gets overbuilt at the point of construction so you can upgrade to run more energy over the same wires without replacing them.

Anyone know?

The NYPA is in the process of upgrading the Massena-Adirondack transmission lines which will initially be at 230kV, but later be able to be run at 345kV.

https://www.nny360.com/news/stlawrencecounty/power-authority...

Lol your 150km loop captures Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston in Canada and Watertown/Plattsburgh NY.

All of these are about as apples to oranges in relation to geographic ties to Massena as you can get.

Between Massena and those places is a whole lot of nothing for a couple hours.

That's like saying there is some meaningful geographic tie between Bethlehem, PA and NYC (133km), or that "Unity House, PA" is not remote because it's 143km away from NYC and its 8.4mil residents.

Perhaps Massena is geographically remote and isolated then, but it is certainly not when it comes to the electrical system, which is what is being discussed here. There is plenty of existing transmission capacity to export hydroelectric power from Massena even without Alcoa and Coinmint.

Do you know how much to costs, per km, to run and maintain those lines?

You seemed to be asserting that without a major user near the dam, they would need to build more transmission lines or otherwise waste the generating capacity available.

This seemed unlikely to me, as transmission grids are built with significant redundancy, especially for the high-voltage networks. For example, the transmission capacity for the 8 500kV circuits from Bruce Nuclear (ignoring 3 230kV circuits) is 1.5 times the generating capacity. I wasn't sure about this particular station, but with a bit of digging, it seems like the Massena-Adirondack lines alone (there are several others) can carry 900MW, which is more than the capacity of the power station. So no additional lines should be needed.

I can't be that much since we've had long distance high voltage transmission lines for decades, even in relatively poor countries.

Plus, if you really wanted to because there was no other use, you could, you know, shut down the hydro power plant and return the land to nature. Hydro power plants still have an environmental impact, no point in running them for what is practically, speculation.

In the US, the people who pay for those lines are the consumers and it isn't cheap to run. This translates to more expensive power bills.

Shutting down the dam isn't going to happen. It is split by Canada and the US and does more than just power Coinmint.

The lines are cheap enough to run. About 1-2% of the electricity cost in the UK.