Outages spark de Blasio to ask NYC to conserve energy amid heat wave

Mayor Bill de Blasio urged New Yorkers to limit their use of electricity Wednesday as the ongoing heat wave led to blackouts across the city.

“We need everyone to turn things down, turn things off immediately,” de Blasio said.

“Don’t have lights on if you don’t need them.”

The mayor delivered what he called the “urgent message” from City Hall as the temperature at LaGuardia Airport reached 98 degrees.

“We do not want to see things go from bad to worse,” he said.

“There’s a really big strain being placed on our electric system by this amount of heat.”

The worst outage is in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, where about 1,700 customers are without power, de Blasio said.

The mayor said he realized that “the situation has gotten tougher in the course of the day” after speaking with Timothy Cawley, president of the Con Edison energy company.

“In the last couple of hours, they’ve come to the conclusion it’s a bigger challenge just because of the intensity of the heat, and, again, the cumulative impact of four days in a row, which is not typical,” de Blasio said.

“We do not want to press the limits of the system. This is where we need to see a reduction in demand quickly to make sure we don’t run any risks.”