New York's $6B 'Chippy' power line is mostly offline, and drought isn't helping

The Champlain Hudson Power Express—a 339-mile underground transmission line nicknamed ‘Chippy’—was supposed to be a quiet workhorse for New York’s climate goals. It opened in May with the promise of delivering up to 20% of New York City’s electricity from Quebec’s hydro-rich grid. On July 3, during a brutal heat wave, it proved its potential by shuttling in enough power to meet 9% of the state’s total demand.

But that early win now looks like a blip. The $6 billion project, backed by Blackstone’s Transmission Developers and Hydro-Québec, has been mostly offline since July 4. A damaged cable section on the U.S. side of the border triggered the second of two outages in its first month of operation. While the faulty segment has been replaced and Hydro-Québec expects repairs to wrap up soon, the hiccup exposes the messy reality of commissioning massive new infrastructure. As Normand Mousseau, a physics professor at Université de Montréal, noted, this equipment hasn’t really been tested until it’s in operation.

The reliability question extends far beyond one damaged cable. Quebec has been parched by three years of intense drought, eating into the very hydropower reserves that CHPE is betting on. If the reservoirs are low, the line’s ability to deliver on its 20% promise gets shaky. A similar project, the New England Clean Energy Connect line, has also sputtered with outages and delivered very little additional energy since opening in January.

For now, New York’s grid isn’t sweating the downtime. The state’s system operator never counted on CHPE for this summer’s reliability, a conservative planning principle that kept the lights on during July’s heat wave. The real test comes in future years, when these multi-billion-dollar transmission projects are expected to become load-bearing pillars of a decarbonized grid. If they can’t shake the startup jitters—and if the rain doesn’t return to Quebec—that transition gets a lot more expensive.