Somewhere under the Hudson River, in a corridor of bedrock and drilled casing, two cables as thick as a forearm are being threaded toward a converter station on the Queens waterfront in Astoria. They belong to the Champlain Hudson Power Express, and when they are energized they will carry about 1,250 megawatts of hydroelectric power from Quebec into New York City, enough to cover a large share of a typical day's demand in the five boroughs.
The project has been discussed in New York for well over a decade. What changed is the state's math. New York's 2019 climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, commits the state to 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and a zero-emission grid by 2040. The city, meanwhile, still depends on a set of older power plants that run hardest on the hottest afternoons. Closing that gap requires importing clean power at a scale the downstate grid has never hosted, and in April 2023 the state energy authority, NYSERDA, awarded 25-year contracts to two transmission projects to do it: Clean Path NY, running about 1,300 megawatts from upstate wind and solar, and the Champlain Hudson Power Express.
I · The routeFrom Hertel to the East River
The Quebec line begins at the Hertel substation near Montreal, where it taps into Hydro-Québec's system. From there it runs roughly 340 miles south. The notable engineering choice is how little of that distance anyone will see: most of the route is designed to be buried underground, typically along existing transportation rights-of-way, with submarine sections crossing Lake Champlain and running down the Hudson River before the line comes ashore in Queens. Burial is slower and far more expensive than towers and sagging wire, but it sidesteps the permitting fights that have stalled overhead lines across the region for a generation, and it leaves the surface almost untouched.
That discretion has a price. The project is budgeted on the order of $6 billion, developed by Transmission Developers Inc. with Blackstone as its backer, and it has taken years of federal and state approvals, including a presidential permit for the international crossing, to reach construction. At last public report the developer expects the line in service in 2026, though anyone who follows transmission knows to treat a single year as an estimate rather than a promise.
II · The landingWhy Astoria
The city end of the line is a converter station in Astoria, on the Queens side of the East River, hard against one of the densest load pockets in the country. Direct current is how the project moves that much power that far with acceptable losses; the converter station is where the DC becomes AC and the power steps into Con Edison's local system. Locating the landing there matters more than it might seem. Downstate capacity constraints mean the city sometimes struggles to import power even when upstate generators have surplus to sell. A direct injection into the city, roughly a gigawatt and a quarter of it, relieves that constraint at the point where it bites hardest.
The whole project is engineered so that the most visible part of it, from the sidewalk, is a construction fence.
III · The sourceHydro, with an asterisk
The electricity is contracted from Hydro-Québec, whose reservoir system is among the largest low-carbon generation fleets in the world. The delivered electrons are genuinely low-carbon, and for a city counting down to a 70 percent renewable target, a 1,250 megawatt firm block that arrives on schedule is worth a great deal of intermittent promise.
The honest caveat is that large hydro in Quebec remains contested. Some environmental and Indigenous groups have long questioned the cumulative impact of the province's reservoirs, and New York's own renewable standard historically excluded large hydro for similar reasons. We report this project as low-carbon rather than impact-free, and we think the distinction matters for how the city tells the story of where its power comes from.
IV · The stakesWhat 1,250 megawatts means here
A megawatt number means little without its setting. The city peaks in the neighborhood of 11,000 to 13,000 megawatts on the most demanding summer days, and its tightest hours have historically been covered by some of the oldest and dirtiest units in the state fleet, the peaker plants that fire up when transmission and local generation fall short. A dependable import of this size does three things at once: it gives those peakers less reason to run, it frees room on the downstate grid for the wind and solar being built within the state, and it buys time for the longer queue of projects, offshore wind chief among them, that are still years from first power.
V · The riskWhat could slip
Everything above is a plan, and transmission plans slip. The same 2023 contract round that birthed this project has already seen timelines shuffled by supply chains, by siting negotiations, and by the sheer difficulty of boring beneath a working river. The developer's 2026 target has held at last report, but a prudent reader should hold the date loosely and the direction firmly: the line is being built, the state is contractually committed to its output, and each season of construction narrows the remaining uncertainty.
VI · The mapReading the city like a subway diagram
Our figure on the homepage draws the new lines the way the city draws its subways: three routes, flat color, no geography. It is a cartoon, and we label it as one. But the cartoon captures something true about how these projects will be experienced by most New Yorkers, which is as a line on a map and a change on a bill, not as hardware. The hardware is under the river. The map is on our wall.
When the converter station in Astoria hums for the first time, the city will not flicker and the skyline will not change. The change will show up instead on a load chart in a control room, at three in the afternoon on the hottest day of the year, as a little less red than the year before. That is what a decade of drilling is for. The line under the river is a bet that the cheapest megawatt New York will never see is the one that arrives quietly, on time, and already clean.