By Christen Smith

ITC Holdings said last week it’s looking for utilities to buy capacity on the Lake Erie Connector, an underwater 345-kV HVDC transmission line that will transmit 1,000 MW of power back and forth between Ontario and Pennsylvania.

The “shovel ready” project has cleared the last of its permits, ITC Chief Operating Officer Jon Jipping told RTO Insider on Friday, and the company now hopes the five-year investment of time and money spent jumping through regulatory hurdles in the U.S. and Canada will pay off.

“We had a really big plan and gave ourselves enough time,” he said of ITC’s progress since acquiring the project in 2014. “The connection of these two markets is going to bring some real savings.”

Lake Erie Power Corp. first conceived of the project in 2013 as a solution to the Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator’s excess power and congested transmission lines and PJM’s growing demand for emissions-free generation. (See Merchant Transco Plans 1,000 MW Line into PJM.)

Jipping said Ontario’s renewables penetration could help PJM states meet their clean energy targets, while Pennsylvania’s vast reserves of shale gas could provide lower-cost energy to the Canadian province.

“We took a strategic and tactical view of the project to go and get the permits, spend the money and get the land rights because we really felt it lent a lot more credibility to what is a very unique project,” he said. “It’s two countries, it’s connecting new markets, going across a big lake.”

The project mirrors other underwater transmission lines in France and Spain, Jipping said, and carries lower risk thanks to the progression of HVDC technology. Still, he said the construction — which will take upward of three years — isn’t without challenges.

“I don’t want to say it’s easy, but it’s fairly straightforward,” he said. “Lake Erie is not very deep. It’s much less challenging, technologically, compared to the offshore wind projects in New Jersey.” (See Orsted Wins Record Offshore Wind Bid in NJ.)

PJM’s most recent generation interconnection facility study estimates network upgrades for the project will cost $4.7 million with an in-service date of March 31, 2024. The 73-mile bidirectional line will traverse underneath Lake Erie to connect a retired 4,000-MW coal plant in Nanticoke, Ontario, to a new converter station in Erie, Penn., which will eventually tie into Penelec’s existing Erie West substation. Neither the RTO nor the utility had anything to say about the project at this phase.

RTO Insider reached out to Erie County Executive Kathy Dahlkemper to discuss her dealings with ITC throughout the permitting process. Although she was unavailable for comment, Dahlkemper told Buffalo’s NPR affiliate in 2017 that she didn’t expect the project to cause problems in the community where ITC planned to build the new convertor station.

“You have to understand that this is coming into Erie County in probably one of the least populated areas, particularly along the lake,” she told WBFO. “So the impact to where people live to their property is actually fairly minimal because of where they are coming in to our county.”

Jipping told RTO Insider on Friday that early concerns from Erie residents about property values and water contamination were allayed through public meetings and slight changes to the developer’s initial construction plans. He said company representatives will return to the local townships once construction begins to answer more questions.

“We were able to explain what we were doing and were able pick routes that were minimally impacting the community,” he said. “We had to buy a little more property than we wanted and do some route changes, but that’s pretty normal for us.”