The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday approved market rules for the Champlain Hudson Power Express project, a $6-billion, 1,250-MW merchant transmission line that is set to begin delivering hydropower from Canada to New York City in May.
The high-voltage, direct-current buried transmission line spans more than 300 miles from the Hertel substation in Quebec, Canada, to the Astoria Annex Substation in Queens, New York. It is slated to deliver 10.4 TWh a year from Hydro-Québec under a 25-year contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
The project is owned by Blackstone-backed Transmission Developers Inc. under CHPE LLC. The transmission line will be under the control of the New York ISO in the U.S. and Hydro-Québec in Canada. The owners aim to bring it into service by May 1, according to a filing at FERC.
The market rules FERC approved include revisions to NYISO’s Open Access Transmission Tariff and its Market Administration and Control Area Services Tariff. The revisions will allow NYISO to integrate the project’s physical reservation model with the ISO’s financial reservation system. The ISO told FERC the project will be the first merchant transmission facility under its operational control that employs physical reservations to allocate transmission rights.
”[A]t least initially, the Project will be implemented as a unidirectional transmission facility over which [merchant transmission facility] Reservation holders can submit Bids to NYISO to schedule Imports into the [New York Control Area] from Quebec,” the decision says.
Specifically, energy will be delivered to the Astoria Annex Substation and will earn the locational based marginal price that NYISO develops for the Astoria Proxy Generator Bus, it says. CHPE will manage reservations for transmission service on the project, and NYISO will schedule transmission service for import into the control area.
CHPE is funding the entire construction, maintenance and operation of the transmission line, the decision noted, but statewide, ratepayers are projected to see their energy bills increase about $1.65 per month for the first full year of operation, the New York Times reported last month.
The project’s website celebrated its imminent launch, saying the transmission line is “ready to power New Yorkers into the future with clean, renewable hydropower.”
“And just in time, too, as the state’s new Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) requires that New York be powered by 70 percent renewable energy by 2030,” it adds.
The fate of CLCPA has lately been in question as New York Governor Kathy Hochul, an early supporter of the Champlain Hudson Power Express, has recently sought to delay the compliance timeline.
Hochul has said the the state needs “breathing room” to reach its clean energy goals in an era of high power bills and federal policy reversals on renewables, energy efficiency and climate change.
