NU details Hydro-Québec project

A Northeast Utilities affiliate formally petitioned the U.S. government for permission to build aerial power lines southward from Canada, with an eye on importing power generated by Hydro-Québec to comply with environmental requirements in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative under way.

First proposed in 2008, Northeast Utilities hopes to have the power lines in service by 2015. The Hartford-based company is designing the lines to provide 1,200 megawatts of power, sufficient for the equivalent of 1 million homes.

The $1.1 billion project will primarily feed electricity for use in New Hampshire, but Northeast Utilities says the Northern Pass project will allow it to comply with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) under which Connecticut and nine other states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector 10 percent by 2018.

Other planned projects include the Cape Wind turbine farm off Nantucket, Mass., and the Bluewater Wind farm off New Jersey. At the same time, Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant has not won support from Vermont officials for a renewed license, which threatens to extinguish a major source of energy that does not create carbon emissions.

Northern Pass a joint venture
With its minority partner NStar, Northeast Utilities formed Northern Pass Transmission L.L.C. and based the joint venture in Manchester, N.H., where Northeast Utilities owns the Public Service of New Hampshire utility. Northeast Utilities is in the process of acquiring NStar, with Northeast Utilities CEO Chuck Shivery and NStar CEO Tom May saying the Northern Pass project helped bring the companies together to the brink of a merger.

“That Hydro-Québec project is something that Chuck thought up many, many years ago,” May said, speaking at an investor conference sponsored by the Edison Electric Institute financial conference in California this month. “I laughingly call it my dowry. He gave me 25 percent (of the stock) and now he took it back. But here is a project that will reduce the cost of energy in the region, but yet will remove five times the carbon of the infamous Cape Wind project.”

Not all are in a joking mood about the project ”“ particularly some residents in New Hampshire. Running south on poles at least 80 feet tall, the lines would terminate at Franklin, N.H., where they would connect with a 345 kilovolt line snaking to a Northeast Utilities substation in Deerfield, N.H.

Line location a key to permit
In a filing with the U.S. Department of Energy, Northern Pass indicated a key part of the permitting process will be whether to run the lines through existing rights-of-way in the White Mountains National Forest, or whether to obtain new rights of way to skirt the protected wilderness area.

Some would prefer Northeast Utilities incur the added costs of burying the lines, noting a separate project called the Champlain-Hudson Power Express that is laying cable in the Hudson River to bring renewable energy from Hydro-Québec to the metropolitan New York City area. That project had initially envisioned hooking east up Long Island Sound to Bridgeport to provide renewable power in Fairfield County, but abandoned that original final leg.

Only in 2008, Northeast Utilities itself completed $1.6 billion in upgrades in southwest Connecticut, which include a new cable connecting Connecticut with Long Island, N.Y.; and aerial cables running down the heart of Fairfield County between Bethel and Norwalk. The group of projects won Northeast Utilities the 2009 Edison Award from the Edison Electric Institute, which recognizes companies for outstanding leadership and innovation.

Even as application work proceeds on Northern Pass, actual construction continues on Northeast Utilities”™ New England East-West Solution, intended to provide more reliable power in southern New England by creating four, 345-kilovolt transmission lines in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.