Something You Might Not Know About: Blackstone’s Champlain Hudson Power Express
The Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), a transmission corridor owned by a subsidiary of private equity group Blackstone, is designed to import hydroelectricity from Canada to Queens. A closer look at the situation, however, reveals that the project represents an effort by a leading fossil fuel profiteer to augment its fossil fuel profits with greenwashed imported hydropower as a false climate solution.
State support - and legal questions
The New York Public Service Commission manufactured a Certificate for the CHPE a decade ago. But there was no buyer until 2021, when the Cuomo administration quietly required state agency NYSERDA to procure this electricity in advance for profitable resale to NYC as so-called Renewable Energy Credits. Former Blackstone executive William Mulrow was brought in by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to promote the project during the COVID emergency. Now Gov. Kathy Hochul boasts, “The beauty of this project is you won’t know it's there; this is all underground. It’s not going to go through our beautiful mountains, our beautiful rivers, and streams, the wonderful beauty of upstate New York, people won’t even know it’s there.”
View of the Hudson River, Kingston, NY, 2023. (Photo: Lee Gough)
In fact, CHPE is a planned 339-mile transmission corridor for high voltage direct current cables to be installed in vast wild and human habitat, including under Lake Champlain, a significant part of which is within the boundaries of the Adirondack Park Preserve. This raises the question of whether the project might violate Article 14, the “Forever Wild” provision of the NY state constitution, as some have suggested.
A 2021 NY State Appeals Court ruling on another Article 14 case seemed to open a door for a wide interpretation of park wilderness protections, including “perhaps most importantly, the state watershed.” Still, no major conservation group has acted yet. The power corridor also includes 117 miles in the Hudson River, also known as Muheakantuck in the language of the Munsee people.
Built for private profit
The over $6 billion project is to be built and owned by Transmission Developers Inc. (TDI), a subsidiary of private equity group Blackstone. The CHPE has been releasing the Emergency Management and Construction Plans for the cable corridor trajectory in segments. It has not yet released for public review and comment the EM&CP for a significant part of the Hudson River from Greene County to NYC. While the company says it is planning to release the Hudson River plan in March, critics believe this segmented approach makes it difficult for the public to grasp the project in its totality.
Weave it into action!
Initiate community conversations to reimagine grassroots solutions to climate change that benefit living ecosystems and economies. Large environmental NGOs are not always representing the best public interests.
Write letters to local, regional, and national media outlets to raise awareness and call for better coverage. Urge community leaders to fight or withdraw their support for Blackstone’s plan to use the Hudson River as a conduit for power and profit from megadams.
Advocate for New York Renewable Energy Standards that exclude big hydropower and for-profit transmission.
Learn about the real impacts of hydropower and other climate false solutions at climatefalsesolutions.org/hydroelectricity.
Fight for the rights and responsibilities of water ecosystems. Join river defenders groups, such as Talking Rivers or The Ecoassembly.
As New York passed the Build Public Renewables Act in 2023, this merchant transmission project with a foreign energy supplier represents an antagonistic retrenchment of private energy precedent and profit. If the CHPE continues, New Yorkers will be subsidizing Hydro Quebec, whose sole shareholder is the Quebec government, instead of promoting state and local energy economies. Merchant power projects such as CHPE are less regulated and are built purely for private profit without substantive public need.
According to a 2022 report published by Little Sis and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, Blackstone is one of the private equity “dirty dozen” driving fossil fuel climate crisis. At the time of the report, Blackstone had a significant ownership stake in Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Big Hydropower is dirty energy
Rivers are a life support system for the planet, yet they are in acute crisis, making dam removal an ongoing and urgent issue. According to American Rivers, 1,957 dams have been removed within the US since 1912, 57 of those in 2021 alone.
In 2023, for the first time, the EPA reported methane emissions produced by dams and their reservoirs as required to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Within a three-year period, methane traps 100 times the heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). Methane emissions are highest when dams are new. Fluctuating water levels modulated by consumer demand create dead zones where habitat and species can no longer thrive.
In October 2023, Hydro Quebec completed their fourth dam on the pristine Romaine River. In the same year, having made hydropower export deals such as the $6 billion CHPE project in the Northeast US, and with Quebec Premier François Legault advertising the province as the “green battery” of the Northeast of North America, Hydro-Quebec announced a need to find 100 terawatt hours more of electricity to meet projected 2027 shortfalls.
Hydro-Quebec also announced in its 2023 Strategic Plan Update that it is reinvigorating surveys and studies on the hydroelectric potential of the Petit Mecatina River in Labrador, the longest wild river in the Cote-Nord Region of Labrador and Quebec. The vast and important river is known to the Innu as Natukamia Hipu, or river of broken waters, and in Naskapi regional dialect as Kuekkuatsheunekap Shipu, or wolverine river.
Even while regulatory constraints would prohibit such megadam structures from being built in the US, New York state has accepted the CHPE/Hydro-Quebec premise that exporting environmental injustice can be part of New York’s green transition, and that ecological impacts in New York can be brushed off.
Exporting environmental injustices is not OK
Promoting Canadian hydropower as clean, green and/or renewable has always been compatible with ecocide, colonialism, racism, and cultural genocide against First Nations people. For example, the Cree, the Innu, and the Innuit of Muskrat Falls all now endure severe restrictions on wild foods.
People of impacted territories are poisoned by the high levels of methyl mercury that result from food web contamination leeching from flooded soils under reservoirs. According to a 2016 study by Harvard University, “The human and ecological impacts associated with increased methyl mercury exposures from flooding for hydroelectric projects have only been understood retrospectively, after the damage is done.”
The river ecosystem’s health is at risk
200 miles of the Hudson River is an EPA-classified Superfund site, making it the largest and most complex Superfund site in the country. It is also an American Heritage River of historic significance with a unique ecological system as the second largest fish spawning area on the East coast. For the CHPE project, high voltage electric cables would be installed by “jetplowing” the riverbed. Jetplowing is a submarine procedure which uses high powered water jets to blast away sediment in the creation of a trench for cable laying. Since the early days of the project, environmental groups such as Riverkeeper have expressed concern that this procedure could re-suspend settled sedimentary legacy toxins from years of industrial misuse and pollution, threatening life in the river in known and unknown ways. These toxins include: PCBs, heavy metals, petroleum, pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins and emerging contaminants, as well as radionuclides from Indian Point nuclear reactors.
Left: Churchill Falls after it was dammed in the 1970s. The Innu made formal notice opposing the CHPE in 2020, citing the harms of damming Churchill Falls and flooding of the Meshikamau area. (Photo: Past Due, reprinted with permission)
Right: Fish Consumption Advisory on the Hudson River. The river has been contaminated with PCBs since the 1940s. (Photo: Lee Gough)
It is not known what effects high-voltage cables emitting electromagnetic frequency waves would have on the lives and migratory patterns of the River’s various types of fish, crustaceans, birds, insects and mammals who use earth’s geomagnetic field to orient their lifecycle movements, such as sturgeon, eels and monarch butterflies. Furthermore, bivalves and submerged aquatic eelgrass perform critical work cleaning the river.
The shipping industry is threatened
The Hudson River is also a Major Marine Highway, where ships transport millions of tons of cargo, such as trash and ethanol. CHPE intends to cover 14 miles of riverbed granite areas and existing utility infrastructure with concrete mattresses.
In an August 2023 statement, the huge Towboat Harbor Carriers Association, which represents 30 tug and barge companies and four shipyards in the Port of New York, said it strongly opposes the use of such concrete mattresses, arguing that they create the potential for marine disaster due to high hazard anchoring risk.
Vulnerable communities must be defended and protected
Over 100,000 people draw tap water from the Hudson. The CHPE paid for its own one-time, half-mile sedimentary sampling test, and the Hudson 7 Drinking Water Intermunicipal Council collaborated with them on the testing. The company argues, based on this testing, that concerns about drinking water are unfounded. Still, the results were not third party-verified, and the testing was not replicated in other locations at variable sediment depths.
A legal Peer Review Report for the tests, done by the Town of Esopus, which the author was able to review, raised questions and issues with the tests but remains unpublished. Furthermore, following these tests and analysis, findings from far more extensive tests, done in the context of the EPA’s failure to remediate PCBs in the river, have seemed to suggest the urgency of the precautionary principle in decision-making.
Some of the households using the river for drinking, bathing and cooking are NY state-designated disadvantaged communities already burdened by pollution. Many are also owed remediation as historic environmental “sacrifice zones” (a term whose history is grounded in systemic racism and settler colonialism).
Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 5, 2024, to provide additional clarification on several points.
