New York Just Got a Huge Influx of Clean Power. It Still Needs More
(Bloomberg) -- The Champlain Hudson Power Express is now delivering hydroelectric energy from Quebec to Queens. New York State’s long-term contract with Hydro-Quebec began June 1, providing a major supply of carbon-free power as the state works to meet high targets for renewable capacity and emissions cuts.
But rising electricity demand and the hurdles facing offshore wind means the gap that the transmission line helps fill is only getting bigger.
“The question is, is it big enough to make a huge dent?” said Rob Gramlich, founder and president at consulting firm Grid Strategies. “And I think as the needs keep growing, no single line like this can make a major dent anymore.”
The 339-mile long transmission line, backed by Blackstone Inc., can transmit up to 1,250 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1 million households. It’s expected to deliver about 10.4 terawatt-hours of clean energy annually to the New York metropolitan area and to decrease CO2 emissions by an average of 3.9 million metric tons per year, the equivalent of removing 44% of passenger vehicles from New York City.
The state’s climate targets are ambitious, even after Governor Kathy Hochul struck a deal last month to water down its landmark climate law. It’s still aiming for 70% of the electricity on its grid to be renewable by 2030. Excluding the Power Express, that share is now 32%, according to the state’s climate dashboard.
The Power Express was one of the first projects that Hochul pushed for, said Ken Lovett, the governor’s senior communications advisor on energy and environment, and she “remains strongly committed to a clean energy future.”
The line was designed to get more clean energy directly to New York City. But the city’s power demand is expected to rise as climate change makes summers hotter and building owners replace fossil-fuel heating systems with electric heat pumps to comply with Local Law 97. The New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, projects that electricity consumption in the city will increase by 23% by 2050.
“We’re going to have to push farther on every front,” New York City Comptroller Mark Levine said in an interview. “Mega projects like offshore wind, micro projects like rooftop solar in the city, innovative projects like geothermal wells.” The city’s pension funds have committed to invest $50 billion in climate solutions by 2035, Levine noted.
New York’s challenge is part of a broader shift taking place across the US. After years of relatively flat electricity demand, grid operators and utilities are revising forecasts upward as electrification increases. Data centers and other large power users are putting new strain on grids, pushing states to build power plants and transmission infrastructure faster than anticipated.
Since the Power Express began development, a complementary buildout of offshore wind has faced hurdles as President Donald Trump moved to block that sector. The Interior Department halted construction on Equinor ASA’s Empire Wind off Long Island before a judge allowed it to proceed. More recently, the Trump administration paid TotalEnergies SE $1 billion to cancel wind projects, including one off the coast of New York, a move that the state is challenging in court.
Nevertheless, Empire Wind and another project serving New York customers, Sunrise Wind, are on track to be completed by 2028, said Harrison Sholler, a renewable energy analyst at BNEF. He doesn’t expect any additional offshore wind capacity to come online unless there is major policy change. But BNEF projects that about 20 gigawatts of solar capacity and 6 gigawatts of onshore wind capacity will be added to New York’s grid over the next decade.
Even with the Power Express online, the grid is still likely to experience strain during summers ahead. NYISO projects that New York City’s so-called transmission security margin will fall into a deficiency by 2029, meaning the grid would no longer meet reliability standards under certain conditions without additional resources.
As new projects enter service, “reliability margins improve substantially,” NYISO said in a report, but then they start to erode as demand increases.
“There’s no escaping the reality that significant load growth makes it harder to meet climate targets, and that’s just a reality that most states are facing,” said Gramlich.
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