CHPE’s Heat-Wave Test and What It Just Told Advanced Manufacturing
Randy Wolken, President & CEO

When a transmission line supplying up to 20% of New York City’s electricity fails during peak demand, the economic risk is immediate, especially for manufacturers that depend on uninterrupted power. The Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), designed to deliver 1,250 megawatts of hydropower, was meant to bolster supply, but its scale also highlights how much is at stake when a single asset falters.

During its first major summer stress test, CHPE went down twice amid a severe July heat wave. The first outage followed a technical issue at the Hertel Converter station in Quebec, and a later outage was attributed by Hydro-Québec to “electrical anomalies,” according to the Times Union.

The immediate lesson isn’t that CHPE is unimportant. It’s the opposite. New York needs large-scale transmission, dispatchable power, and regional energy connections. CHPE remains a major strategic asset. But the outages reveal the danger of treating any single project as a substitute for a full reliability strategy.

New York Independent System Operator (NYISO)’s cautious planning now looks prudent. Its 2026 summer assessment showed only a 417 MW baseline reliability margin — the lowest in recent history — leaving the grid vulnerable to deficits under extreme heat conditions. In practical terms, that margin represents less than 1% of peak demand, an extraordinarily thin buffer for a system supporting millions of residents and a growing industrial base. NYISO’s position is clear: the grid can’t depend on one project or one generator. That’s exactly the right standard for a manufacturing economy.

For advanced manufacturers, grid reliability isn’t an environmental side issue. It’s an operating condition. Manufacturers run precision equipment, robotics, thermal processes, clean rooms, compressed-air systems, CNC machines, furnaces, and digital production networks. Even short disruptions can mean lost batches, damaged materials, missed customer deadlines, overtime costs, and weakened confidence in New York as a place to invest. For example, a momentary outage lasting just a few seconds can cost a semiconductor fabrication facility hundreds of thousands of dollars in scrapped wafers and restart procedures, while a one-hour outage at an automotive plant can exceed $1 million in lost production.

CHPE’s problems also highlight a deeper issue: electrification, reshoring, AI, semiconductor production, and advanced manufacturing growth all require more electricity, not less. New York’s economic development strategy depends on power that’s clean, affordable, abundant, and available at peak demand. If policy assumes supply will arrive but operations prove otherwise, manufacturers carry the risk. In the near term, meeting this rising demand also requires maintaining and expanding reliable natural gas electricity generation to ensure sufficient capacity while clean energy resources scale up.

The advanced manufacturing implication is clear: New York must build redundancy into the energy transition. Transmission matters. Hydropower matters. Efficient gas resources, offshore wind, solar, storage, nuclear, and demand response all matter. Natural gas generation, in particular, remains essential today to provide dispatchable, on-demand power that stabilizes the grid, especially during peak periods and unexpected outages. The state shouldn’t frame reliability and decarbonization as competing goals. For manufacturers, they’re inseparable.

This moment should also reshape discussions with energy decision makers. MACNY and its business and community partners need to push for a reliability-first energy agenda. This agenda requires faster permitting for generation and transmission, realistic reserve margins, accelerated interconnection, industrial demand-response tools, long-duration storage, and continued support for dependable natural gas capacity. Furthermore, it demands transparent accountability concerning major grid assets that could underperform.

CHPE’s outage during a heat wave is a warning, not a verdict. The project should be fixed, strengthened, and integrated into New York’s grid. But the broader system must be designed for failure tolerance. Manufacturing leaders understand this instinctively. No serious production system depends on a single point of failure. New York’s grid shouldn’t either.

For advanced manufacturing, the message is direct: energy reliability is now economic competitiveness. The states that can deliver dependable, affordable, clean power will win the next generation of industrial investment. The states that can’t will watch projects, jobs, and supply chains go elsewhere.

CHPE still matters. But these incidents proved that one cable can’t carry the future of New York manufacturing. Policymakers must immediately prioritize and fund a diversified portfolio of generation and transmission projects, including maintaining and expanding natural gas electricity production to meet immediate demand, streamline permitting timelines, and enforce accountability standards for grid performance.

Manufacturers should actively engage in energy planning processes, invest in on-site resilience solutions, and advocate for policies that ensure consistent, high-quality power.

The path forward demands coordinated action now: build redundancy, expand supply, accelerate execution, and treat reliability not as a constraint, but as the foundation of growth and the price of staying competitive.