A $615 million project to ease one of the transmission bottlenecks in upstate New York is nearing completion.

State officials last week announced the Central East Energy Connect (CEEC) upgrade undertaken by LS Power Grid New York and the New York Power Authority is now 75% complete with energization of a new substation in Princetown, west of Schenectady.

The 345-kV CEEC runs 93 miles from the Utica area east to the Albany area. The upgrades are designed to not only increase the CEEC’s capacity but improve its reliability and resilience. Steel monopoles are replacing wooden H-frame towers that are more than 60 years old in some cases. Four existing substations along the route are being upgraded, and two new substations have been built and are now in service.

Completion is anticipated later in 2023 and will result in a nearly five-fold increase in capacity.

The CEEC upgrade arose from a December 2015 finding by the state Public Service Commission that a Public Policy Transmission Need existed for new 345-kV transmission facilities to move power from upstate to downstate. LS Power and NYPA submitted a joint proposal in August 2019, and the PSC adopted it in January 2021. Work began the next month.

As thousands of megawatts of wind and solar generation capacity are planned upstate to carry out New York’s clean energy transition, the need for such transmission lines will only grow.

The CEEC is just one of several such transmission projects on the drawing board or in progress across upstate New York, and far from the largest:

• The rebuild of NYPA’s 86-mile Moses-Adirondack Smart Path is nearing completion.
• NYPA and National Grid began work in December on Smart Path Connect, which will add 45 miles on the north end of Smart Path and 55 miles on the south end, where it will connect to the CEEC.
• New York Transco is progressing on the New York Energy Solution, a rebuild of 54 miles of north-south transmission lines in the Hudson Valley south of Albany; the 456th and final monopole was erected earlier this month.
• Last year NextEra Energy Transmission New York completed the Empire State Line, which runs only 20 miles but includes a new 345-kV hub for western New York and links to the state’s largest electric producer, the Niagara Power Project.
• Work recently began on the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a $6 billion project running 340 miles underground and underwater from Quebec to New York City.
• NYPA, energyRE and Invenergy have teamed up on a 175-mile underground and underwater transmission line called Clean Path NY that would run southeast through the Catskills to New York City and is now in the permitting process. With associated wind and solar generation projects, the price tag is estimated at $11 billion.

The planning continues, as New York works toward an emissions-free grid by 2040, with concurrent increases in power demand and variability of power supply.

The PSC in February approved 62 transmission upgrades with a combined capacity of 3.5 GW and an estimated cost of $4.4 billion. Last week it approved an $810 million clean energy hub designed to increase transmission capacity in New York City amid the demand of electrification, with many more upgrades expected there in the decades to come.