A hydropower line bringing electricity from Canada into the New England grid began commercial operations Friday. The 145-mile transmission line from Quebec to Lewiston cuts through northwestern Maine.
The New England Clean Energy Connect project, first proposed in 2017 to meet Massachusetts’ clean energy goals, has faced controversy. It’s also an alternative to the Northern Pass - which many Granite Staters may remember as the failed proposal to run 192 miles of new power lines from Canada through northern New Hampshire, then east to Deerfield.
Dan Dolan, the president of the New England Power Generators Association, spoke with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa about the new power line and what it could mean for New Hampshire’s electricity costs and hydropower future.
Transcript
So we know the power line is expected to save the average Massachusetts customer a modest amount per year on their bill, but how much will it impact electricity costs here in New Hampshire and in the rest of New England?
So I will say my organization actually disputes, a bit, the savings in Massachusetts. Our view is this is actually an above-market contract that Massachusetts consumers will pay. However, the irony with that is because Massachusetts is paying for the full cost of the transmission line and the power coming over it, it will actually suppress the price of electricity in the rest of the regional grid.
Meaning that for New Hampshire, this could end up being an economic savings, despite the fact the transmission line neither comes into New Hampshire nor is the power directed to New Hampshire. But it will then create more power that Massachusetts will have, freeing up other power plants at potentially lower costs to serve New Hampshire and other consumers across the region.
So how much power can we expect this transmission line to add to the New England grid?
The contract is for roughly 1,000 megawatt to be delivered across the year, which, to put that in perspective, is just about equivalent to the size of the Seabrook nuclear facility.
There is another nuance to this, however, which is while Massachusetts has contracted for that power over the transmission line in Maine, there is nothing in that contract that prevents using some of the existing transmission interconnections with Quebec to flow power the other way, creating an open question as to, on a net basis, what is going to be the overall net energy gain in New England. That right now is the biggest element of this I will be keeping an eye on for the next several months.
Find more of NHPR’s reporting on the Seabrook nuclear plant here.
As we've seen here in New Hampshire with the Northern Pass, it's been a challenge for utility companies to build new transmission lines — to balance getting more clean power and preserving the land where the transmission lines would be. How did that play out in the process of building this hydropower transmission line?
So New England is a hard place to build anything, and energy infrastructure in particular is an extraordinary challenge. Northern Pass was one of the most emotional heightened of those infrastructure projects I've ever seen in my career.
This, coupled with the ongoing saga of offshore wind, are two of the starkest examples of why this is so challenging. And it does have to do with, how do you balance community input, the local impact that this has for so many of the communities that have to host this large infrastructure? Who benefits from that infrastructure then? What are those benefits and how are they realized, either in the form of the energy delivery itself, economic development, taxation view, shed all of those different elements? And then finally, who pays for this?
And I'll end by also noting, for the last 20 years, we've seen the largest increase in pace and growth of transmission spending that we've ever seen in this industry. And I think the balance is how much can the customer base bear from a cost standpoint, and what is the political appetite for communities to see that level of development and construction. It really feels like we're getting awfully close to that tipping.
Why do you feel this succeeded in Maine when it failed in New Hampshire?
To boil it down, it came down to some legal and regulatory specifics rather than an overall sentiment. We did see very unpopular projects in both states. One was able to get over the finish line, and Northern Pass clearly wasn't.
How has New England historically leaned on Quebec for energy. What does that look like now?
So we've had a decades-long relationship of cross-border trade. However, what we have seen is, over the last decade, a significant decline in the amount of electricity that New England does receive from Quebec. You know, if we look from 2017 to 2025, those net imports of electricity in New England [from Hydro-Québec] have gone down roughly 75%. In fact, the last three months — October, November and December of 2025 — New England, for the first time in my career, was actually an electricity exporter to Canada.
So how that now evolves with this new intertie is a fascinating question that I think all of us here in New England on the electric side are wanting to take a look at. To what degree do we see this just being a replacement for some of those historical flows? Or does it truly become additive, incremental on top of that, which was the vision of these projects like Northern Pass and NECEC when they were first proposed.
What does this mean for hydropower and other clean energy in New England and in New Hampshire for the future?
So there is a large generation base coming from hydropower that's indigenous to New England. My hope is that this does not impact those facilities. Those are really some of the backbone clean energy, reliable and affordable generation sources. That would be a tremendous loss for this region at a moment in which we are having a hard time building new infrastructure, and electricity demand is rising. So the challenge we now face is how do we integrate this large-scale new source while preserving all of the existing infrastructure that's already here?
How does this new source of clean energy affect legacy fossil fuel generators in the region?
If this is an additive project from NECEC, then my expectation is we see less generation from some of the existing fossil fuel facilities. Importantly, those facilities will still be necessary to be around. But my expectation is their operations will be less. Then we start to see them ramp up for those peak periods in the coldest winter days and the hottest summer summer days.
Listen to Outside/In's 2017 series about Canadian hydropower producer Hydro-Québec here.
