The other big dam: St. Lawrence-FDR at Massena

I. A dam cut in half by a border

Formally, the structure is the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, named for Robert Moses on the New York side and Robert H. Saunders on the Ontario side. NYPA, the New York Power Authority, operates the American half as the St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project (FDR for Franklin D. Roosevelt), and Ontario Power Generation runs the Canadian half, the R.H. Saunders station. The international border runs down the middle of the river, so two utilities share one dam and one head of water while answering to two different governments.

On generating capacity, the New York side runs on the order of 800 megawatts across its units, per NYPA's project pages, with a roughly comparable block on the Ontario side. The project came online in the late 1950s, which makes the equipment old by grid standards and the upkeep a running story rather than a one-time event. Treat any single output number as approximate, because actual generation rises and falls with how much water the river is carrying that week.

II. Who sets the license, and who sets the water

Permission to operate the project is a federal license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, the agency that licenses private and public hydropower), filed under Project No. 2000, the docket a reader would search as P-2000. FERC issued the current license in 2003 for a 50-year term, so the authorization runs into roughly the early 2050s before the next full relicensing. Fifty years is a long leash, but it carries yearly conditions on fish passage, recreation, and shoreline that NYPA has to keep meeting, and those compliance filings sit in public view on FERC's eLibrary.

Water is a separate question with a separate referee. The St. Lawrence is an international river, so outflows at Moses-Saunders are set by the International Joint Commission (IJC, a United States and Canada body created by treaty), acting through its International Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Board. Since 2017 the board has used a regulation plan called Plan 2014, which weighs Lake Ontario levels, shipping, shoreline property, and the river's ecosystem alongside power. When the lake runs high and the shoreline floods, as it did in some recent years, hydro output drops down the priority list, and the board says so publicly.

III. Where the cheap power lands, and how to trace it

NYPA does not bid this power into the open market the way a merchant plant would. A large share is sold at cost to municipal electric systems and rural cooperatives, and another share goes to employers through long-running economic development programs, including allocations aimed at keeping industry in the North Country. The idea, going back to the project's origins, was that public power from the river should stay close to the river.

If you want to see whether this reaches you, the trail is short. Check whether your community buys from a municipal electric department or from a big investor-owned utility, because municipal systems are the ones most likely to carry St. Lawrence hydro. NYPA's own site lists its hydro customers and allocations, and for the statewide picture, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO, the nonprofit that runs the state's bulk power system) reports how much hydro New York leans on day to day.

IV. Worth watching this month

1. The International Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Board posts monthly updates on its outflow decisions at Moses-Saunders, and the autumn ones are usually routine unless Lake Ontario is running high.

2. NYPA board meeting materials, posted on its site, sometimes take up St. Lawrence-FDR capital and compliance items, and spending on units this old is the thing to watch there.

3. FERC's eLibrary under Project No. 2000 (P-2000) carries the project's ongoing compliance filings, so a new entry would be the signal, since nothing major is on a fixed schedule right now.

4. NYISO's seasonal reliability assessments note how much the state is counting on hydro through winter, and a cold, dry stretch upstate is when that number actually starts to matter.

5. Lake Ontario water level forecasts, published by the IJC and the US Army Corps of Engineers, are the honest early warning that spring power output may take a back seat to flood control.