Power in the park
The large boats will prowl Lake Champlain all day and all night for five months.
Barges up to 300 feet long and 90 feet across will carry 12 miles of spooled electrical cable, navigation equipment, a tall crane and a specialized crew. They will drop the cable 4 feet deep in their wake and cover 2 miles a day. The underwater installation will stir up sediment, displace bottom-dwelling creatures and alter the lake’s ecology.
Then the boats will be gone.
“I call it a one-time disturbance,” said Tim Mihuc, a professor of environmental science at SUNY Plattsburgh.
The extraordinary activity will leave behind a hidden thread of power delivering a near-constant flow of energy from manmade reservoirs in Quebec and Labrador to Queens, effectively an Adirondack Park-sized battery projected to provide about one-fifth of New York City’s massive electricity needs in the coming decades. Construction may start in a few months and the cable could be laid in 2024 as part of a major transmission line called the Champlain Hudson Power Express.
Financed by one of the world’s richest private equity firms, The Blackstone Group, the CHPE is championed by its supporters as essential to unwind New York’s reliance on carbon-spewing fossil fuel and meet a 2040 target of emissions-free electricity. The project’s opponents denounce it as a green-in-nameonly risk built on a legacy of mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and continuing ecological harm to Canadian rivers, one that boxes out New York energy producers.
The project, announced in 2010, is backed by scores of elected officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul. Securing state and federal permits, in 2013 and 2014, CHPE generated thousands of comments to the Public Service Commission and a promise of a $117 million trust fund to support environmental restoration.
The commission in April approved a 25-year state contract offering billions of dollars to Hydro-Quebec, a corporation tied to the Quebec government, for delivering renewable energy. The contract enables developers to move
