Maine has long taken a haphazard approach to energy policy. Looking back through the years we often contemplate big ideas without fully understanding the consequences, we allow complex concepts to be distilled down to oversimplified notions, and we retreat to our partisan corners when we can’t agree. We deregulated Maine’s energy market to varying success, we set precedent and politicize complex policy questions at the ballot box, and we often have to “fix” laws, including Maine’s net energy billing program because of spiraling costs to ratepayers.
That said, one recent law stands out to me as thoughtful and intentional: L.D. 1959, the Governor’s Utility Accountability Bill, which passed in the last legislative session. As we plan for the impacts of climate change, and as ratepayers demand more from their utility companies, our leaders came together, identified priorities, sought feedback, and implemented a sweeping new law to ensure our utilities are performing to our expectations.
This governor’s bill did many meaningful things, like establish a utility “performance report card” that would impose financial consequences on CMP and Versant for not achieving customer service and reliability metrics. The first ever report card is due this spring.
It also required Maine’s utilities to submit Climate Change Protection Plans to the Maine Public Utilities Commission. These plans focus on studying how climate change will affect electric infrastructure assets, and on identifying and developing the resilience measures necessary to protect the grid in the face of more devastating storms.
The governor’s Utility Accountability Bill became law in the last legislative session, and as the Public Utilities Commission and the utilities work to implement her sweeping reform bill, members of the legislature are now considering a brand-new idea: L.D. 2172, Performance-Base Rate Design.
Or are they? On first pass, much of this proposed legislation is highly duplicative of L.D. 1959. It’s also fairly ambiguous, placing more administrative cost, uncertainty, and burden on the Public Utilities Commission at a time when they already have a lot of work to do.
Just look at the storms that devastated Maine in late 2023. We know we need big investments in grid resiliency to address climate change, but this bill will make it harder to do so. It creates regulatory uncertainty by introducing new risk and will make it harder to attract the large amount of low-cost capital investment we need at the lowest cost to ratepayers.
These outcomes are the opposite of what we need, and contradict the path forward the governor laid out in her recent State of the State.
In its current form, and with so much at stake, we must give the Public Utilities Commission time so it can do its job by implementing the laws we already have on the books, including L.D. 1959. While I agree we must continue to prioritize urgent action to address climate change, in some cases we must begin to urge patience as the many government agencies, companies, and organizations work to implement the new laws, policies and regulations we have in place.
Maine needs a cohesive energy strategy. Instead, what we have feels like whiplash as individuals try to advance narrow concepts supporting single issues, or dream up the next big idea. We are faced with big challenges. and we must stay focused on working collaboratively. We have that opportunity with L.D. 1959, and rather than passing L.D. 2172, a law that is so duplicative, the legislature should allow PUC the time it needs to do its job.
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