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Quebec doesn’t want to bail out the Northeast again. It wants a regional grid.
The Northeast has a mismatch between its climate ambitions — some of the most aggressive decarbonization targets in the country — and its resources for renewable energy. While the Pacific Northwest has rivers and gorges, the Southwest and Southeast have lots of sun, and the Great Plains has lots of wind, the major renewable resource in the Northeast lies on the Atlantic Ocean, where plans for billions of dollars in offshore wind investment are being delayed or even outright canceled as high costs take its toll on the industry.
But what the Northeast does have is a long border with Quebec.
The Canadian province plays a major role in the decarbonization plans for the entire region, thanks to the construction of transmission lines that could conceivably shuttle power both ways across the border. The Champlain-Hudson Power Express will connect 1,250 megawatts — enough to power about one million homes — of Quebec’s hydro resources to New York City by the spring of 2026, while the New England Clean Energy Connect is scheduled to complete its construction through Maine down to Massachusetts by 2025, conveying a similar amount of power.
Quebec already is a world leader in decarbonization, getting nearly all of its electricity from its massive network of dams managed by the state-owned Hydro-Québec. But it also has its own power needs — and ambitions — besides being a source of bulk power south of the border. The province wants to fully decarbonize by 2050, which means doubling its electricity consumption and devoting a big chunk of additional capacity to electrifying heat, transportation, and industry. That could include using Quebec’s non-carbon-emitting power to produce hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes.
“There is a selective approach taken — we don’t want all the demand,” explained Serge Abergel, the chief operating officer of Hydro-Québec, referring to which projects would get access to the province’s plentiful and cheap renewable power. “We’re taking a selective approach with the government of Quebec to determine which projects will bring most value and transition the economy.“
So where does that leave exports? Could the Northeast count on Quebec for clean power as it sees, at best, delays in building out its own renewable generating fleet?
“This relationship is evolving,” Abergel told me. While the two transmission lines are under construction, “it’s been a very difficult experience,” due to political roadblocks, he said. The New England line took a famously circuitous legal route to construction, having been first defeated in a referendum, which was then overturned in a lawsuit.
And as for new export projects, simply throwing up new transmission lines south is a thing of the past, he said, having explained to Bloomberg that its baseload commitments are reserved for the New England and New York transmission lines. This means that any new transmission lines — and there have been several proposed besides the two under construction — will have to be more than just bulk power exports.
Going forward, Hydro-Québec wants to use its hydro power to complement ample renewable resources in the neighboring regions of the United States.
“We believe our neighbors will stay the course,” Abergel said, referring to neighboring states’ decarbonization plans. “There will be lots of intermittent renewables all around us.”
That combination of hydro power and wind power, John Parsons, a senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management, told me is “a flexible system ... that can balance renewables in New England.” Theoretically, when it’s very windy on the Atlantic Coast, a renewable-rich New England (and New York) would sell power to Quebec, letting the province conserve its hydropower (i.e. keep water in its reservoirs) for when the wind dies down and renewables are not powering the Northeast’s whole grid.
“Our resource is extremely flexible in terms of being dispatchable. These two resources complement one another very well when you aim at an 100% clean grid,” Abergel told me.
When Parsons and two colleagues modeled the flow of electricity between New England and Quebec, they found “it is optimal to shift ... away from facilitating one-way export of electricity from Canada to the U.S. and toward a two-way trading of electricity to balance intermittent U.S. wind and solar generation.” Making Canadian hydropower “a complement, rather than a substitute” for low-carbon energy sources in the U.S. would make deep carbonization about a fifth to a quarter cheaper.
But this would require a change in mindset on both sides of the border — not to mention to the economics of offshore wind. “It’s clear that policymakers originally ... did think of [hydro] as a substitute,” Parsons said. While the existing transmission lines can send electricity both ways, the market structure for large scale trading of electricity both ways doesn’t exist, Parsons said. “The idea of it going two ways is not in the current contracts … You have to sign protocols and negotiate agreements to smooth out trade between.”
Developers in the United States have heard loud and clear that Quebec is interested in more than just sending power in one direction. The proposed Twin States Clean Energy Link, which recently won support from the Department of Energy, is explicitly designed for electricity to flow both ways. The planned line would run from the Canadian border through Vermont and New Hampshire
“As a bi-directional line, Twin States will enable clean energy producers in New England, such as offshore wind, to export excess capacity to Quebec during times of lower domestic demand, providing a critical boost to the region’s clean energy economy,” according to the project’s website, where it’s explicitly sold as a way to boost the region’s wind power.
While Abergel would not say what he directly thought about the specific Twin States project, he did say that “so far we do have interest in the concept” of connecting New England and Quebec into a regional balancing system. “Much work needs to be done to determine how to bring value to both regions.”
“We’re at a crossroads right now where there’s a certain way of doing things that’s now behind us, and being achieved, and we have this pause where we reflect on the future and how to make it as efficient as possible,” Abergel said. “There’s lots of opportunities,” he told me.
But, the idea that “we have lots of power to send down south and can do another transmission line wherever, we’re not there anymore.”
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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.
Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.
On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So first of all, walk me through your report. How has the community conflict over renewable energy changed in the U.S. over the past year?
A few things I would highlight. In Ohio, we now have 26 out of 88 counties that have established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited. These restrictions are explicitly enabled by the state law, SB 52. I’d also highlight that while the majority of litigation in our database is state-level litigation and contested case administrative proceedings, there are certain types of projects — particularly offshore wind — that have an extremely high prevalence of federal litigation. A majority of federally permitted offshore wind projects have been subject to federal lawsuits. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have never succeeded on the merits, but they keep filing them and they drive up costs.
In general, as a topline takeaway, [our] report shows more and more of the same.
You personally do quite a bit of legal work on solar and wind permitting battles in the state of Ohio, where as you noted counties are curtailing deployment left and right. What’s your bird’s eye view of the situation in the state right now?
So Ohio has for years had a state-level siting process. The Ohio Power Siting Board reviews all applications for large-scale energy generation facilities, 50 megawatts or larger. The Siting Board has a set of criteria they are required to apply when they are reviewing an application, but basically only one of them seems to matter in deciding whether a project is approved or denied: whether the project serves the public’s convenience and necessity.
We’re seeing that in the majority of proceedings for approvals of large-scale wind and solar projects, there will be groups that intervene in opposition to the project, and often these groups will argue that there is so much local opposition that the project cannot possibly serve the public interest.
The Power Siting Board has been rejecting that argument in important cases recently. The board is still putting substantial weight on whether local governments are supportive or not supportive of a project, but are not rejecting projects just because of a demonstration of local opposition.
Say you’re a developer and you start facing opposition. What is the right legal avenue? How should they do the calculus, so to speak, on how to navigate legal options?
There’s numerous things developers can do. They can work with the local government and community-based groups to work with the local government to craft host community agreements, community benefit agreements — voluntary but binding contracts with the local community where a developer provides benefits; in exchange, community-based groups would agree to support the project, or at least not to oppose it. These can be very helpful and particularly meaningful in places where a local government itself is not in charge of permitting decisions themselves. So in a state like Ohio, if a developer negotiates host benefit agreements with local township governments and then those governments don’t turn around to intervene against a project, those would be extremely helpful.
It’s also important for developers to do community outreach and build a base of local supporters, and get those supporters to turn out at public meetings. Historically opponents of projects are more motivated to show up at a local meeting than supporters, but it’s really not a good look for a project when you have 500 turn out against it and 10 turn out to support.
For years the opponents were very proactive. There would be a proposal for a project in one county in Kansas and a group of opponents in the neighboring county would propose a restrictive ordinance to block future projects — supporters weren’t thinking proactively in the long-term. I think a concentrated effort will produce meaningful results. But they’re behind.