Canadian Renewable Hydropower Is Heading To New York City

New York City is on track to receive a mega load of renewable electricity from Canada. The Champlain Hudson Power Express project will send hydropower hundreds of miles from Quebec via transmission cables to a converter station in Queens.

The project is part of a pair of infrastructure investments expected to provide the five boroughs with more than 18 million megawatt hours of renewable energy a year — enough to power 2.5 million homes or a third of the city’s annual electricity usage. Developers say the hydropower energy lines could support one million homes on their own.

Renewable energy is the primary topic of Thursday’s session at COP26, the United Nations’ 26th climate change conference. New York leaders hailed the Champlain Hudson Power Express project as transformative, but environmentalists are voicing concerns over the risk the line may pose to aquatic life and riverside communities.

Transmission Developers Inc. (TDI), a subsidiary of the private equity firm Blackstone, plans to build the 339-mile transmission line that will run under Lake Champlain and the Hudson and Harlem rivers. The hydropower project stands to create about 1,400 union jobs during construction alone. Slated for operation in 2025, the initiative would drastically cut carbon emissions in New York City, which currently takes 85% of its electricity from fossil fuels.

“This is a big, big deal, something we’ve been working on for years that has finally come to fruition,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, who announced the $3-billion venture alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul in late September as one of two green-energy projects chosen to power New York City.

The second — Clean Path NY — will connect wind and solar power in western and upstate New York to the city with a price tag of $11 billion. Contracts will need to be finalized and approved by the New York State Energy Research Development and Authority (NYSERDA) and the state’s Public Service Commission. Both projects would work toward a mandate for carbon-free energy to support 70% of the state’s electricity by 2030.

Water quality concerns

After snaking under Lake Champlain, the line will take an overland route through the middle of the state — around former General Electric plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, where pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were released into the Hudson River. Both shallowness and PCBs made that area of the river unsuitable for the line, said TDI’s CEO Donald Jessome.

“We looked for a land route and the CP [Canadian Pacific] railroad right of way made a lot of sense to us,” he said.

The line will be buried along the Canadian Pacific and CSX Transportation railroad right of ways and then be placed into the riverbed with a jet plow, said Jessome.

“It shoots water on top of where the cable is,” he added. “That lifts the sediment underneath the cable, the cable sinks into the trench and then the sediment sits back on the cable.”

The project has put nearby communities that draw their drinking water from the river on edge.

“It disturbs the sediments,” said Gary Bassett, mayor of the Village of Rhinebeck, which takes water directly from the Hudson. “Those sediments can be contaminated, putting our drinking water quality at risk of contamination.”

Bassett expressed particular concern over a toxic group of chemicals named PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), also called “forever chemicals.” Those have been found at dangerous levels in the drinking water of riverside communities in Newburgh and New Windsor.

“The cable runs close to all of our water intakes,” said Bassett, who chairs Hudson 7, a group representing seven communities that rely on water from the river.

The group is asking the developer to run tests to see how jet plowing might affect water quality before construction begins next year.

“There are a lot of belts and suspenders around this issue,” and the company must follow state and federal regulations to the letter, said Jessome. “Laying the cable and jet plowing will literally go by communities in days, not weeks,” he said. “But we are very open to working with any community.”

Some environmental groups, such as the New York League of Conservation Voters and Citizens Campaign for the Environment, support the Champlain Hudson project. But others like the Sierra Club are flat out opposed, concerned it could disrupt the river’s ecosystem as well as PCBs and other toxins that settled decades ago in the riverbed during New York’s industrial years.

“The whole Hudson River is a Superfund site, for 200 miles from New York City up past Troy, where GE is cleaning up the PCBs,” said Dan Shapley, director of Riverkeeper’s science and patrol program. “There are pockets of contamination. We know where some of those pockets are, but we don't know where all of them are.”

Shapley pointed to acres of coal tar, left behind by an old manufactured gas plant in the City of Poughkeepsie, as an example.

“This cable will be running down through the length of the river, hitting whatever is there, whether it's PCBs or coal tar, or other contaminants that are in the mud,” he said.

Dams and damage?

Another environmental concern is dams, which form a critical component of hydropower systems owned by the project’s power provider, Hydro-Québec.

“The dams that are creating the hydropower have had, historically, a huge effect on the indigenous people there,” said Shapley, speaking about damage caused to tribal lands in Canada and methylmercury in fish that live near the dams.

Environmental groups are worried about electromagnetic fields (EMF) that could have a negative impact on aquatic life in the river, including endangered and electrosensitive sturgeon. To this point, Jessome said the line would be moved out of the water and onto land to avoid the sturgeon population at Haverstraw Bay in Rockland County.

North of the border, the Champlain Hudson’s five-inch-thick cables will lie underground for about 40 miles and pass through lands owned by the Mohawks of Kahnawake, who signed a co-ownership agreement for the power line with Hydro-Québec, a longtime supplier of electricity to the state.

Hydro-Québec spokeswoman Lynn St-Laurent said the project would not lead to the building of new dams, though one dam is now under construction as part of a previous build-out plan, she said.

“As it stands, we don't see the need for new dams in the foreseeable future,” St-Laurent said. The utility already uses solar and wind power, she added, and recently called for bids from wind power farms.

Hydro-Québec also planned to deliver electricity along a separate 1,200 megawatt power line to New England states, but Maine voters rejected the project in a referendum on Tuesday. Its fate is now unclear.

President Joe Biden cited hydropower in his COP26 messaging this week. But this brand of renewable electricity also has an uncertain future in Biden’s reconciliation bill, as federal lawmakers haggle over tax credits for modernizing outdated facilities.

New York’s newest hydropower endeavor includes a $40-million fund to provide training for jobs in the green-energy sector and a $117-million environmental fund to benefit Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. Final approval for the Champlain Hudson Power Express project by the New York Public Service Commission is expected early next year.