Albany Approves Canadian Hydropower Deal to Power New York City—Montreal Keeps the Lights On

New York City’s embrace of Canadian hydropower signals a turning point for urban clean energy—one with implications well beyond the metropolitan area.

On a grey Sunday morning, as traffic burbled along the FDR Drive, a new kind of current began its journey to the beating heart of New York City. In late spring, city leaders formally agreed to take delivery of vast quantities of hydropower generated over 330 miles away in Quebec. After years of debate, political squabbling, and environmental wrangling, the $6 billion Champlain Hudson Power Express project has finally broken ground, with promises to deliver enough clean energy to light up more than one million homes by 2026.

The compact is straightforward, if ambitious: a high-voltage transmission line will snake from Hydro-Québec’s turbines across the border, underwater along Lake Champlain and the Hudson River, and finally emerge in Astoria. Once switched on, the pipeline is expected to deliver 1,250 megawatts of emission-free power directly into the city’s grid. City Hall brands it “one of the most significant steps” in its quest to decarbonise local electricity, and Governor Kathy Hochul has been keen to tout the project as both a climate milestone and an economic win.

For New Yorkers, the new deal is no mere abstraction. The city remains highly dependent on oil- and gas-fired plants, many of them ageing and jammed into neighbourhoods already suffering from paltry air quality. Despite billions spent on rooftop solar and new wind installations, renewable sources currently supply only about a quarter of the city’s appetite for electricity. As more car owners plug in to charge, and as electrification swells household demand, the gap threatens to widen. The import of hydropower, steady and easily ramped up, promises both reliability and a dramatic cut in carbon emissions—albeit at a price.

The first-order effects will ripple through neighbourhoods long blighted by “peaker plants,” fossil-fuel generators that cough out pollutants during bouts of high demand. Officials estimate that the switch to hydropower will lead to the shuttering of these grimy stations in Hunts Point and Astoria, areas where asthma rates remain stubbornly high. The air could soon be cleaner for hundreds of thousands, and the city’s climate targets—a 70% reduction in power sector emissions by 2030—appear less quixotic.

Yet, such progress is neither costless nor universally cheered. Some environmentalists fret that importing hydro merely pushes environmental burdens upstream, damaging river systems in Quebec and infringing on indigenous lands. Local renewable advocates worry that overreliance on Canadian dams could chill the city’s appetite for building out home-grown solar and wind, stymieing nascent industries and costing green jobs. Meanwhile, consumers—already bruised by inflation and high utility bills—may blanch at the price tag, though the city reckons long-term cost stability will offer a boon.

The project’s scale and ambition remind us of the paradoxes at the heart of clean energy transitions: grand engineering can supplant dirty legacy systems, but not without trade-offs. America’s largest city is hardly alone in wrestling with such dilemmas. Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles all cast envious eyes at cross-border or remote renewables as the clock on climate deadlines ticks on. New York’s willingness to reach across borders for hydropower echoes Europe’s cross-national grid deals, where France’s nuclear surplus buoys Germany’s ambitious Energiewende. Critics argue such grids breed dependence; backers counter that a diversified, resilient grid is the lesser evil in a warming world.

A hydropowered city and its ripple effects

At a macro level, New York’s energy import signals the growing internationalisation of urban decarbonisation. Where once localities sought self-sufficiency, now they embrace sprawling supply chains—whether in rare earths for batteries or, as now, in gigawatts of imported electrons. The city’s bet on hydro bodes well for emissions targets but risks embedding a new kind of strategic reliance, every bit as knotty as the old fossil-fuel bargains.

For politicians, the optics of a gleaming cable buried discreetly under riverbeds are vastly superior to visible, contested infrastructure—think contested wind farms off the Rockaways or squat gas plants near schools. Yet the underlying political currents remain turbulent. City leaders must juggle neighbourhood opposition, state regulators, and the ever-watchful Public Service Commission. It is telling that after a decade of hearings, lawsuits, and protests, the winning solution is one New York cannot physically see.

Viewed from a global perch, the city’s gambit offers a test case for megacities grappling with the need to decarbonise at scale, swiftly. Economists note the project’s paltry effect on overall North American hydro output but reckon its influence on urban energy politics may prove weightier. With cities accounting for 70% of global CO(_2) emissions, the move from rhetoric to concrete cross-border projects is overdue.

We welcome the ambition and—on balance—rate the deal as prudent, if imperfect. Imported hydropower is neither panacea nor pitfall; rather, it is a pragmatic step towards a lower-carbon grid, bought at moderate economic and political cost. The city will need to pair such imports with disciplined investment in local renewables to maintain control over its fate and reap the full economic rewards of the energy transition. But as a model for muscular, grid-scale decarbonisation in an urban context, New York’s new cable portends more good than ill.

Clean currents from the north will not solve all of the city’s challenges, but they will help make some distinctly cleaner air possible—perhaps, for once, fulfilling exceeding expectations. ■