Three Ugly Numbers Behind the Governors’ Push for Canadian Hydropower

As the New England Governors and the Eastern Canadian Premiers gathered Sunday in Bretton Woods for their annual conference, it’s likely there was much discussion of building new transmission lines to enable additional imports of Canadian hydropower into New England.  Indeed, financing such transmission lines is the centerpiece of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s pending energy bill and the supposedly “clean” half of the New England Governors’ massive gas pipeline and hydropower plan.

Earlier this year, after the Governors’ energy plan emerged, I broke down three big questions about increasing hydropower imports through new transmission projects:  namely, cost, environmental impact, and reliability.  We’re not alone in asking these questions.  Just last Wednesday, the Boston Business Journal’s managing editor argued that the region deserves a fuller, better accounting of the total costs of the Governors’ initiative to customers.

As we outlined in our preliminary briefing on the documents obtained from the states on the origins of the Governors’ plan, it appears that the economic and environmental analysis commissioned by the Governors is flawed and incomplete.  In the search for hard data points, we offer three of our own.

• $800 million per year above current market prices
• 70% - the carbon pollution of natural gas power over the next decade
• 24 times Hydro-Québec chose to curtail exports in one cold month of winter 2014

Three Ugly Numbers Behind the Governors’ Push for Canadian Hydropower