Richard Garber, assistant professor of architecture at the College of Architecture and Design at New Jersey Institute of Technolog and his student Brian Novello, have put forward a proposal to utilize the tidal action of New York City rivers to produce power for the city. The scheme would, they say, use a network of modular floating docks to harness the energy.

Working at Garber’s firm GRO Architects over the winter break, the two along with Nicole Robertson and Justin Foster (NJSOA ’08) came up with the proposal and entered it in the 2009 Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design Competition.

The docking stations would plug into the conventional piers of New York City. Eventually, the piers would be extended further into the river to optimize clean energy generation while increasing public green space and tidal pools for wildlife. The system would encourage energy awareness by the increased visibility of the connection between the water’s edge and the city’s interior.

The stations would alleviate the need for conventional power to light the city streets. Three vertical turbines fastened to the underside of modular floating dock units would harness river currents. Each module could generate up to 24 kilowatts of constant energy created by the bi-directional four mph current, supporting 350 LED streetlamps.

This is an important idea because it relates to the current work aimed at reclaiming access to New York City’s 578 miles of waterfront. The relationship of the river to the city, not simply its edges, is at the core of the proposal. What if the creation of a modular docking system to expand public access to the rivers and create recreational opportunities could actually produce energy by utilizing the flow of river currents? Energy produced could then be fed back to the city’s power grid through existing underground transmission lines to power urban infrastructure--in this case, streetlamps.

There is already precedent for turbines creating energy in the waters off New York City though the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy project (RITE). However, this new scheme would generate a similar amount of energy while creating new public spaces and tidal pools through which expanded contact with river-based programs could occur.