To the Editor:

I wrote this letter to the Guilderland Town Board on Aug. 3.

I recently learned the Guilderland Town Board may pass a resolution at your Aug. 4, 2020 meeting welcoming the developers of the Proposed Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) to construct a transmission corridor through Guilderland. I urge the town of Guilderland to reject the CHPE resolution.

CHPE is a proposed minimum one-billion watt, 333-mile long direct-current-transmission corridor (power-line) that would traverse eastern New York State from the Canadian border to New York City.  Much of it would be buried under Lake Champlain and under or on the river-bottom of the Hudson River. 

More than 100 miles would be buried along roads and railroad right of ways in Clinton, Washington, Saratoga, Schenectady, Albany, Greene, and Rockland counties. CHPE would cross many rivers, streams, and wetlands.

If the town adopts the resolution, the town is, in effect, and whether the town realizes or acknowledges it, endorsing the continued destruction of distant rivers in Canada, the poisoning of Canadian wildlife and people, the intensification of climate change worldwide, and damaging the New York State economy and environment.

CHPE has been under development for nearly a decade. Construction has yet to begin with many technical and legal issues far from resolved. The Solidarity Committee of the Capital District has opposed CHPE since it was first announced in 2010, and previously opposed and helped defeat the proposed Great Whale River project in northern Québec more than 25 years ago.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo have both endorsed CHPE in recent months.

CHPE electricity would come from Québec and Labrador where government-subsidized, provincially-owned utility companies continue to block (destroy) formerly free-flowing spectacular rivers by constructing dams, dikes, power stations, enormous and stagnant reservoirs, and lengthy powerlines to transport the dirty electricity to New York and New England states.

Hydro-Québec is presently destroying the Romaine River with four dams. Nalcor Energy has greatly damaged the Churchill (aka Grande) River in Labrador with dams at Muskrat Falls (near Happy Valley-Goose Bay) and is planning another giant power station at Gull Island, also on the Churchill River.  Much of this electricity is and would be for export to the United States.

We live in a world where rich and powerful corporations (public and private) often lie about the dangers of their technologies. CHPE electricity would not be safe, clean, or renewable.

Most people think hydroelectricity is clean, but not all of it is. Mega-hydro stations of the type built in Québec and Labrador in recent decades are gigantic in scale and contribute to global warming while poisoning waters and damaging animal and human health.

Submerged river valleys drown vegetation that can no longer remove carbon from the atmosphere.  Rotting submerged vegetation releases carbon into the water and air. Drowned river valleys convert mercury contained in soil and rocks into methylmercury in the water that poisons everything that lives in or drinks the water, or eats fish caught in the water.

Hydro dams are sending species to extinction. Dams and enormous reservoirs disrupt the flow and function of rivers, block sediment movement and nutrients to wildlife. The shores of free-flowing rivers are rich in biodiversity. The shores of reservoirs are much different because the water depth moves up and down, exposing shorelines to changing conditions that create dead zones for wildlife.

The Hudson River is critically important to many fish species, some of which are in serious decline.  PCBs in the Hudson riverbed could be resuspended into the water during cable installation and maintenance.

We live in a world with rapidly intensifying climate change and accelerating species extinction.  Nature, if allowed to, has a tremulous capacity to heal itself. Rather than destroying rivers and watersheds, we should preserve them in the hope that enough of nature can survive and thrive so that people born today will have a healthy planet to live on throughout their entire lives.

The CHPE project is a bad choice for New York State and its economy. CHPE construction would provide only a few hundred temporary construction jobs and a few dozen permanent jobs here in New York.

Hundreds of millions of dollars would be exported from New York State to Canada each year to purchase the imported electricity. Much better would be to invest in energy conservation and efficiency, and appropriately sited solar and wind electricity generation here in New York State or just offshore. 

Tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of good-paying unionized jobs would be created for carpenters, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, roofers, laborers, and others here in New York State by investing in these technologies.

Vast numbers of people, many of whom have never had a good-paying job, could embark on a career pathway. People of color, many chronically unemployed or underemployed in low-paying jobs, could get on a career-track of steady, lucrative employment.

CHPE installation in the Hudson River would be difficult if not impossible and likely be highly controversial. Many cables now cross the Hudson River perpendicular to the direction of water flow and deep enough to not hinder navigation.

The CHPE cables would run for more than 100 miles with the water flow and thus cross each of these existing cables. CHPE developers propose to bury CHPE electricity cables seven feet under the Hudson riverbed and place the cables on the riverbed itself in places where burial is impossible.

Ships operating in the Hudson River sometimes have to drop anchors when fog rolls in and before and during storms. Dropped anchors can sink far more than seven feet into the riverbed; thus anchors might strike or snag on the CHPE cables ….

Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

Tom Ellis

Solidarity Committee

of the Capital District

Albany

Editor’s note: See related story.