NYC unlocks clean Canadian hydropower

Tons of clean electricity is finally flowing from Canada to New York City via the 1.25-gigawatt Champlain Hudson Power Express, a big power line also known as CHPE (pronounced “chippy”). The city is now able to power all of its government operations and cover 20% of citywide electricity demand — equivalent to that of 1 million homes — with hydro shipped in by utility Hydro-Québec.

CHPE, along with the eventual completion of the Empire Wind project off Brooklyn, is essential to attaining New York City’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. Last year, the city got nearly 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and just a measly 3% from hydro.

It’s a long journey from Quebec down to Queens, but it’s been an even longer one to get the power line built. Plans for CHPE began more than a decade ago, and the project faced opposition from environmental groups and residents as discussions progressed. But in the end, CHPE came online a few weeks earlier than expected, just in time to shore up power supplies ahead of summer’s demand spikes.

CHPE is one of two major transmission projects that recently launched to bring Canadian hydropower into the Northeastern U.S. Electricity started flowing into Maine via the New England Clean Energy Connect line earlier this year, capping a decade of controversy that saw the project scuttled and relocated multiple times.

But other challenges remain for both New England Clean Energy Connect and CHPE. Some experts are questioning whether Hydro-Québec can actually generate enough electricity to share with the U.S. When all these transmission line discussions first started, Hydro-Québec was running on 15 years of abundant rain flow, Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor of energy sector management at HEC Montréal, tells Marketplace. Over the past three years, though, the province has faced consistent drought that has diminished Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs.

For its part, Hydro-Québec said earlier this year that its reservoirs are prepared to weather drought conditions. But Quebec also has decarbonization goals of its own to meet, and demand is rising from data centers and industry — two factors that weren’t so big when the utility agreed to sell off its hydropower more than a decade ago.

More and more Americans are getting fed up with data centers, and that pushback is turning into policy action.

A survey out this week from Heatmap shows that 71% of Americans say they’d somewhat oppose or strongly oppose a data center being built near where they live. Just 42% said the same last fall. The mounting blowback comes alongside a wave of data center project cancellations, according to Heatmap: At least 20 projects were called off in the first quarter of this year.

A wave of cities and states are meanwhile looking to head off data center projects altogether. The New York State Legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new construction on Thursday, though it’s unclear if Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) will sign it into law. Residents of Monterey Park, California, meanwhile took their discontent to a new level, voting this week to become the first U.S. city to outright ban data center development.