Champlain Hudson Power Express

CHPE runs 339 miles from the Quebec border to Astoria, Queens, and every foot of it is buried or submerged. That was the whole design premise. Overhead towers killed earlier New York transmission proposals, most notably NYRI, so the developers priced in burial from the start and traded capital cost for a route that could actually get permitted.

Project Scope

A ±320 kV HVDC link rated at 1,250 MW, carrying up to 10.4 TWh a year. The route drops under Lake Champlain, follows CSX and Delaware & Hudson rail rights-of-way through upstate New York, then runs down the Hudson and through the Harlem and East Rivers. The five-inch cables sit roughly seven feet below the riverbed at the water crossings. Transmission Developers Inc., a Blackstone company, developed and owns the U.S. side; Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie owns the Quebec section. Kiewit Power Constructors handled onshore construction and the converter station civils, Hitachi Energy designed, delivered and commissioned the converter station on a remediated site inside the Astoria energy campus, NKT supplied and laid the cable, and Michels Corporation installed the underground transmission. Groundbreaking was November 2022 in Whitehall; commercial operation started 13 May 2026, ahead of schedule.

Why It Matters

New York City burns two-thirds of the state’s electricity and generates very little of it, which is why Astoria has been the pinch point of the eastern grid for two decades. CHPE lands Quebec hydropower directly into that pinch point under a NYSERDA Tier 4 renewable energy credit contract.

It’s also a rare case of a merchant transmission line at this scale reaching energization at all. Blackstone put roughly $4.5 billion of the reported $6 billion program behind a privately financed line with no captive ratepayer, and it finished early. Developers with stalled interconnection queues have been reading the permitting file closely.

Project Team & Details