Fort Ticonderoga Ferry fights against disruption to operation
By Zachary Matson
Installers will begin laying a transmission line this summer across the depths of Lake Champlain in a multi-billion-dollar project to relay Canadian hydropower to New York City, and not everyone is pleased.
The installation work will be hard to miss on the nation’s 13th largest lake. A special-use barge constructed at Wilcox Dock in Plattsburgh to lay the cable is 300 feet long and 90 feet wide. One of two cable transport boats, measuring 187 feet long and 43.5 feet wide, will attach to either side of the main barge and carry cable sections 12.5 miles long.
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Starting in June and working on the lake 24 hours a day until October, the barges and a flotilla of support vessels will inch southward, from the Canadian border to the lake’s southern narrows, dropping nearly 97 miles of cable.
Ferry owner sues
While the project has earned state approval to go forward with lake installation, the owner of the Fort Ticonderoga Ferry is suing to ensure the developer, CHPE, and its contractors do not interfere with his operation, seeking an injunction in Essex County Supreme Court.
The ferry relies on a pair of guidance cables resting on the lakebed that lead the ferry from one side of the lake to the other near the historic fort.
Jack Doyle, who operates the ferry as 1759 Ltd., in a recent interview said CHPE and its representatives have reneged on promises of regular communication, demonstrated a lack of understanding of his business and failed to offer fair compensation for the disruption as negotiations over a potential crossing agreement fell through.
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“What they offered me I personally found offensive,” Doyle said. “These guys slow-walked me, slow-played me … and it’s clear to me they have no idea how they are going to do this.”
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In court filings, CHPE’s attorneys argued the ferry’s centuries-old franchise to operate on the lake does not trump their permit to construct the transmission line on lakebed owned by the state Office of General Services or enable the ferry to delay a project state agencies have deemed critical to the state’s decarbonization goals.
“Plaintiff has no right to interfere with CHPE’s exercise of its own rights, at great cost and damage to CHPE, and in a manner which risks delays to this critical reliability project,” CHPE attorneys wrote in court filings last week. “The ferry has an operational franchise which confers on its holder the privilege of providing ferry services across Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont — with no concomitant land control rights, such as the right to exclude others from that land.”
CHPE’s lawyers have argued that the injunction sought by the Fort Ticonderoga Ferry would cost the developer up to $14 million.
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In a statement through a spokesperson, CHPE said it “continues to attempt to work in good faith” with the ferry owner, noting representatives even visited Doyle in Florida to discuss the issue. “Our objective has been and remains to install this important electric reliability project on schedule, while making all reasonable efforts to minimize impacts to local stakeholders and to ferry operations,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, Doyle’s lawyers on Monday filed new court papers arguing the CHPE project posed a threat of irreparable harm to the ferry operation from delays, loss of goodwill from customers and potential future business disruption. They argued the cost of disruption to the ferry operation was incalculable.
“There is no way they can do this without detaching my cables, and I’m not sure they know how to reattach my cables,” Doyle said in an interview Monday. “Am I going to be forced to work for them?”
Heather Stewart, operations manager for Lake Champlain Ferries, which manages the Plattsburgh to Grand Isle and Essex to Charlotte crossings, said the company is in communication with CHPE contractors and does not expect any delays in the ferry schedule.
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From Quebec to NYC
The Lake Champlain portion is part of the Champlain Hudson Power Express project, a 339-mile-long transmission line that will send electricity from Hydro-Quebec’s sprawling portfolio of dams and reservoirs to power-hungry New York, enough energy to meet about one-fifth of the city’s estimated 2026 electricity needs.
The project is backed by Blackstone Group, one of the world’s richest private equity firms, and hopes to start transporting electricity in 2026.
The Public Service Commission in April approved construction plans for the line’s 97-mile-long Lake Champlain segment, and CHPE plans to begin laying and burying a pair of electrical cables and a fiber optic cable on the lake bed in early June at Rouses Point. Cable installation is scheduled to finish in October at Putnam Station, where the power line exits the lake and begins its underground path through the Capital Region.
Construction has already begun on the power line’s terrestrial segments, including a 20-mile stretch in Washington County. CHPE is seeking commission approval for its construction plans of an 89-mile-long underwater section in the Hudson River, roughly from Catskill to the Harlem River.
Environmental groups Scenic Hudson and Riverkeeper and a coalition of seven towns that pull drinking water from the Hudson River this week filed comments opposing approval of CHPE’s construction plans in the river estuary.
Those groups have outlined concerns about CHPE’s attempt to get approval for a 9-foot cable burial depth instead of the 15 feet previously agreed to, as well as impacts to endangered sturgeon and the risks of stirring up contaminant-laden sediments.
“The protection of drinking water should be among our state’s highest priorities, and allowing for a large construction project affecting contaminated sediments in our water supply should be avoided as a policy,” the Hudson 7 drinking water coalition wrote in comments.
A long time coming
The massive project is more than a decade in the making, receiving state and federal permits in 2013 and 2014, but speeding to realization in recent years due to a deal the state approved in 2022 to pay Hydro-Quebec billions of dollars in renewable energy credits.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and her administration have championed the project as critical to meeting the state’s goal of phasing out carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 2040.
Criticisms of the project have ranged from frustration that it does not provide access to New York-based power generators to highlighting the legacy of mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in the creation of Hydro-Quebec’s huge reservoirs — which combined cover more land in the boreal forests of northern Quebec than all the over 6 million acres of the Adirondack Park.
As part of getting the project approved, CHPE agreed to establish a $117 million environmental trust fund to be spent over 30 years. The Hudson River Foundation was hired to administer the trust.
In December, a governance committee of state and citizen representatives, approved a five-year implementation plan for priority projects, such as aquatic species prevention, fish population assessments and fisheries habitat improvement in Lake Champlain. The administrator is expected to seek proposals for carrying out those projects later this year, according to a statement from the Hudson River Foundation provided through a CHPE spokesperson.
Summer work on the lake
The planned construction in Lake Champlain has been noticed in the media, at area marinas and in discussions with numerous local, state and federal officials.
“We don’t want to be a surprise,” said Khan Peoples, project manager for the project’s Lake Champlain and Harlem River segments.
Pre-installation work will commence this month as cables start to arrive through the canal and work starts to clear debris along the lakebed route using a large grapnel hook. Peoples cautioned boaters and others to avoid the cable installation vessels, particularly when divers are in the water, and to pass in front of the boats if necessary.
The developer worked with the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum to identify and route around sensitive archeological sites in the lake. CHPE also identified other infrastructure the transmission line will cross, coordinating with owners of that infrastructure to agree to compensation.
The fleet of boats installing the cable will progress southward on the lake at a pace of between 300 to 1,000 feet per hour, Peoples said. When they reach the end of one cable segment, the boat will be stationary for around seven days as specialists inside a climate-controlled portion of the barge splice the cable segments together.
At depths less than 150 feet, the cable will be buried four feet deep into the lake sediment; at depths greater than 150 feet, the cable will be laid on the lake bottom.
In the northern portion of the lake, the cable will be installed using a plow that shoots a jet of water into the lake bottom to clear a trench to bury the trio of cables. In less deep water, a shear plow digs the trench.
“The trench instantaneously collapses back in on itself and the cable is buried,” Peoples said. “Technically, it’s quite simple.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated to clarify the source of information regarding the project’s environmental trust fund.
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Zach, The multi billion dollar Champlain Hudson Power Express Line is being built under a clause in Public Service Commission law called “Public Need “ . This means the public need for NYC to go all green electric proclaimed by the Governor gets a green light from all environmental agencies..
Fracking and dam/reservoir building in NY is impossible but boy we sure use a lot of fracked gas, and electricity generated from dams/reservoirs out of state.
Yep and it’s a gain for those free states and a deserved loss for the unfree third-world New York State.
This project seems like a tremendous amount of taxpayer money only to supply 20% of the power needs for the New York city area! It just seems sometimes government and big business just ram their desires down the throats of the working class wether we like it or not! Politicians and corporate America go hand in hand in an effort to secure our tax dollars. Same old story, nothing ever changes!
James,
I concur. While this power artery may come in very hand for our power grid in the event of a breakdown or attack on the grid, transmitting power over long distances in general is not a good idea. It is both inefficient and expensive.
For 50+ years Big Oil (and accordingly, politicians) has waged an effective campaign against modern nuclear power. Much of Europe is benefitting from smaller, “modular” nuclear power stations. Yes, installing just one of these plants is expensive, but scale it up to 100 plants and the cost/plant drops. The main advantage is the smaller the plant, the closer you can get it to where the power is to be used – requiring fewer long-distance transmission lines and giving that community less reliance on the national grid. Worldwide movement in this direction can also spur more research dollars into making fusion reactors cost-effective.
Too bad that Mario Cuomo and Nassau County canned the 800 mW Shoreham nuclear plant in the last century followed by his Andrew Cuomo forcing the closure of the two 1000 mW nuclear power plants in Buchanan NY.
Now NY can send more money out of its economy to Quebec. Hydro Quebec’s electric rates will not be cheaper over the long-term and will not replace the jobs lost due to high electricity costs and the firing of employees who worked at carbon-based and uranium-based power plants. Moreover, a long and frigid winter in Canada will adversely affect hydropower output, which is never firm, leaving New York short of electricity.
Hydro Quebec will actually run short of hydropower (which is not the clean resource that it’s touted to be) thanks to deals like the one it made with NY (see https://energynow.ca/2023/04/big-power-shortfall-looms-after-quebec-wooed-us-with-cheap-hydro/). Brownouts and blackouts anyone?
Banning elements 6 and 92 in New York will just accelerate the exodus of people (hopefully not Democrats) to the free states. I’m so glad I no longer live in New York.
Vermont has used Canadian Hydropower for decades. It’s made us one of the lowest carbon emitting states in the US with the blessing of the Cree in northern Quebec who are compensated for the use of their water and lands. Nuclear is great but we have tons of highly radioactive waste on the banks on the banks of the Connecticut river. No thanks.