Jim Planck has a terrific story in The Daily Mail about the U.S. Department of Energy hearing Tuesday night in Kingston about a proposal to route a high voltage Direct Current line from Canada to New York City. Highlights:

The project applicant, Transmission Developers, Inc. has applied for permission to run the line’s twin cables underneath the bottom of Lake Champlain, then the Champlain Canal, where it would come out of the water and circuit around the PCB dredging project above the Hudson by utilizing railroad rights-of-way, then enter the Hudson River at Coeymans and submerge beneath its bottom, and run down to the Metropolitan area, where the DC would come back on land at a converter station and be turned back into useable AC current.... Speaking at the project’s scoping session at Kingston — one of seven DOE is holding along the route — TDI President Donald Jessome told those present that an original part of the plan which had called for a companion set of cables to serve southern Connecticut by way of the Long Island Sound had been dropped.... Jessome said the project is thus now a 1,000 megawatt, $1.9 billion plan, with an in-service date of 2015.

Planck quotes Riverkeeper’s Hudson River Program Director Phillip Musegaas, and Sierra Club Ramapo-Catskill Chapter conservation chair Jurgen Wekerle, who spoke about the dangers to fish and the possibility of kicking up the PCB's in the Hudson River when putting the cable in the water. Read the entire story in The Daily Mail.