The Canadian province of Québec is pursuing one of the world’s most aggressive decarbonisation programmes — aiming to stop using fossil fuels for heat or transport within the next quarter of a century while selling more of its clean hydroelectric power to the US. But the province is using a neat trick to make all this work: it is having New York power plants produce those emissions instead. Electricity has flowed, mostly south, across this part of the US-Canada border for more than a century. Hydro-Québec, the province’s state-owned utility, generates more electricity than it needs, almost exclusively from hydroelectric dams. Québec’s government, which has touted itself as “the battery of North America”, gets a windfall as its megawatt-hours are sold to neighbouring grids in New York and New England. Up until a few years ago, about 100 times as much power flowed into New York as went the other way.
New York prior to 2022 was getting around 6 per cent of its electricity from Québec — but now it is Québec’s grid that is being squeezed. The province’s ambitious decarbonisation drive encouraged residents and businesses to swap gas and oil furnaces for electric heat pumps and to buy new electric vehicles, which have driven up electricity demand.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Financial Times (paywall)
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Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute
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