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Economy

The Canadian Wildfires Ominously Messed Up a Clean Energy Power Line

New England had to burn oil when hydropower was briefly cut off up north.

A hydroelectric dam.
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The Quebec forest fires that have recently contributed to some of the worst smoke days in American history are also wreaking minor havoc on the electric grid.

Observers of electricity markets were puzzled Wednesday evening when grid operator ISO-New England announced that “due to an unanticipated transmission outage and higher-than-forecast consumer demand,” the New England grid would be calling on reserves “to balance the regional power system.” Demand that day did not seem particularly or unexpectedly high, nor were there any obvious supply issues in New England, so why was ISO-NE having trouble? More illumination came Thursday, when it specified there was a transmission issue with its imported power.

A spokesperson for Hydro-Québec, the French Canadian utility, told me that its Phase-2 power line, which connects the vast amounts of hydropower generated in northeastern Canada to a substation over 900 miles away in Boston, went down briefly yesterday due to forest fires in the James Bay region. “Heat and smoke can trigger automated system protection mechanisms, which will essentially shut down the powerline in order to protect it,” the spokesperson said. These are many of the same fires that have recently blanketed the eastern and midwestern United States in smoke.

Imported hydropower from Quebec plays a crucial role in New England’s grid, responsible for over 11% of the region’s total electric use in 2022. New York is also looking to expand its use of imported hydropower, with a new transmission line that will run from the Canadian border to New York City and is currently under construction.

Quebec itself essentially powers its entire grid with its massive hydropower resources, making it one of the least carbon intensive grids in the industrialized world.

Some of that excess hydropower has been exported to New England for decades, and it has become more and more attractive south of the border as New England and New York seek to decarbonize.

The actual scale of the disruption in power delivery turned out to be well within ISO-NE’s capabilities to manage. The grid operator didn’t ask consumers to use less power, as Texas did in the past few weeks when its grid was beset by high temperatures and record consumer demand, or as New York and California have done on hot days. But in addition to pulling in more imports from New York state, ISO-NE also had to burn oil for electricity, which New England sometimes does when its natural gas supply runs short, especially in the winter when gas is used for heat.

While the system in both Quebec and New England survived the transmission hiccup — a Hydro-Québec spokesperson made sure to note that “our bulk transmission infrastructure has not suffered any damage as a result of the forest fires” — it does underscore the threat that even non-carbon-emitting electricity generation faces from the effects of climate change. In addition to briefly shutting off this transmission line, forest fires have also reduced solar generation due to blocking out the sun.

On the other hand, as Joe LaRusso of the Acadia Center, a New England clean energy group, pointed out to me, transmission is also what saved the day when Quebec’s imports were shut off, as imports from New York picked up the slack. “It serves as a demonstration not that transmission is a weak link, but that it’s the principle means of enabling balancing authorities like ISO-NE and NYISO to rely on one another to make up for variations in capacity.” That’s as true of “unplanned generator and transmission outages” as was the case in Quebec, as it is for more predictable fluctuations in solar and wind power.

“While forest fires are not a new phenomenon, the intensity and increased frequency of these events in North America are the result of climate change,” the Hydro-Québec spokesperson said. “The amplitude of this event should serve as a clear reminder that we need to accelerate every effort towards transitioning away from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity generation.”

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Q&A

How the Wind Industry Can Fight Back

A conversation with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications

The Q&A subject.
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Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”

Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

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Hotspots

A New York Town Bans Both Renewable Energy And Data Centers

And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.

The United States.
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1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.

  • Chautauqua, a vacation town in southern New York, has now reportedly issued a one-year moratorium on wind projects – though it’s not entirely obvious whether a wind project is in active development within its boundaries, and town officials have confessed none are being planned as of now.
  • Apparently, per local press, this temporary ban is tied to a broader effort to update the town’s overall land use plan to “manage renewable energy and other emerging high-impact uses” – and will lead to an ordinance that restricts data centers as well as solar and wind projects.
  • I anticipate this strategy where towns update land use plans to target data centers and renewables at the same time will be a lasting trend.

2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.

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Spotlight

The Wind Projects Breaking the Wyoming GOP

It’s governor versus secretary of state, with the fate of the local clean energy industry hanging in the balance.

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.
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I’m seeing signs that the fight over a hydrogen project in Wyoming is fracturing the state’s Republican political leadership over wind energy, threatening to trigger a war over the future of the sector in a historically friendly state for development.

At issue is the Pronghorn Clean Energy hydrogen project, proposed in the small town of Glenrock in rural Converse County, which would receive power from one wind farm nearby and another in neighboring Niobrara County. If completed, Pronghorn is expected to produce “green” hydrogen that would be transported to airports for commercial use in jet fuel. It is backed by a consortium of U.S. and international companies including Acconia and Nordex.

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