On March 6th, at the start of a still-hard trade war between the US and Canada, the hydroelectric hydro generator Hydro-Québec quietly halted exports of electricity to New England.
The area has been nearly a month at a time when Canadian hydroelectric power supplies up to a tenth of what is normally electricity in New England.
Hydro Quebec leaders say low prices in the New England market, not politics, are behind the decision to suspend sales. The disruption has yet to affect the area’s electricity costs and reliability, but some experts say it can be done if the cutoffs extend into the summer cooling season. The situation also highlights the potential risks to the province’s clean energy plan, which relies on Canada’s hydroelectric power to offset fossil fuels.
“This indicates that the area may be vulnerable to supply operations,” said Phelps Turner, director of Clean Grid, Conservation Law Foundation.
The main power line to New England, known as the Phase II line of Hydro Quebec, has stopped exporting meaningful amounts of electricity two days after President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian imports came into effect. Compared to last March, Turner estimated that it flowed along the line at any time, from hundreds of megawatts to 1,200 MW, from over 1,200 MW, and on average accounted for 5% to 10% of the region’s electricity usage.
The longer New England needs to replace absent hydroelectric power, they often call natural gas or oil power plants to fill with dirty, more expensive electricity, especially as demand increases in summer and next winter.
“Electrically, this is a very boring time, and certainly it’s a much easier time to leave the source or pause here,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Generator Association. “If you think this is a truly durable situation, there are both cost and environmental consequences.”
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In an email from a company spokesman, Hydro-Québec said the lack of exports to market conditions led to the spring weather lowering demand and prices. This move, which others theorized, is also a show of power. Aiming for Trump administration.
For some time, Hydro-Québec has been sending signals that it may be far from powering New England at a historic level. Last year, 5,560 gigawatt-hour power was less than half of the amount exported in 2022, and in the last two forward capacity auctions operated by grid operator ISO New England, Hydro-Québec was not obligated to provide power for 20 months of the 24 covered months.
This pullback could be at least in part due to an unusually dry drought condition that is currently underway in most of Quebec. Therefore, Hydroquebec is faced with choices about what to do with the force it can produce.
“Hydro-Québec will continue to restrict exports like in 2024, as it actively manages its energy reserves in the context of low outflows.”
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The lack of exports from HydroQuebec, coupled with the illusion of tariffs and anti-response fluctuations, focuses on the need for New England grids to develop more state power resources and expand the infrastructure needed to obtain the energy they need, experts said.
“We’ll need all the supplies we can find, and some of that will come from Canada’s hydropower,” said Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director and general counsel at the Clean Energy Industry Association Advanced Energy United. “We need to build things too. We need to build transmission lines. We need to build a new generation.”
Others are concerned that ISO New England is not properly accounting for Canada’s decline in water supply. The grid operator’s planning process still uses the assumption that neighboring regions (mainly Quebec) wanted to send 2,000 MW to New England at moments of very high demand, and that they said they would not attack me as a responsible or appropriate reliability plan given the export trends of Canadian companies.
The situation also raises doubts about New England Clean Energy Connect The transmission line is a 145-mile project designed to import 1,200 MW of HydroQuebec power into New England as part of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Massachusetts Utility. The line is expected to be operational from 2026, and a Hydro-Québec spokesperson said the company will provide its promised authority.
However, recent circumstances have determined the robust Hydroquebec commitment to working together through contracts to actually provide that power, and how tariffs affect the terms of the transaction. They said one promising sign: the company is still sending power to the US over a tiny two-second transmission line that ends in Vermont, which agrees to buy power from Hydro Quebec until 2038.
“It seems to suggest that [Hydro-Québec] “But every contract in every situation is different,” Turner said.
In the meantime, the area will need to wait and see what Hydro-Québec does next.
“It’s hard to say what motivates a decision,” Turner said. “We know that’s happening, but we don’t know why it’s happening.”
