Central Maine Power is developing a major five-year spending plan that it says is designed to prepare the company both for ratcheting electricity demand and increasingly severe weather.

The state’s largest utility plans to ask state regulators for permission to increase its revenue by between $405 million and $455 million from 2026 to 2031.

Maine’s Office of the Public Advocate is warning about the impact on ratepayers in the form of higher bills, but CMP spokesperson Jonathan Breed said the plan should help prevent other, less predictable costs from rising. He noted that recent storm damages already have cost the company, and its customers, hundreds of millions over the last few years.

“We’re essentially trying to take components of the extremely high storm costs, embed them in our base rates and lower the costs we pay for storms over time,” Breed said during an interview last Friday. “We want to be ahead of the problems that we know are going to come.”

To do that, the utility intends to hire 400 new, full-time employees, including 200 line workers to address storm damage when needed and work on other maintenance and upgrades in between weather events. Other hires would include costumer service staff, engineers and project planners, the company said in a written announcement.

The company currently has about 1,000 employees based in Maine, including roughly 285 line workers, Breed said.

“So much of what storm costs are at the end of the day are labor costs,” Breed said. He said CMP has historically needed to hire out-of-state contractors to help address that damage, meaning the company pays a premium for labor and often needs to compete against other storm-ravaged states to secure limited crews.

Beyond storm response, the new work crews would be tasked with stringing hundreds of miles of tree-protected wiring and installing thousands of new utility poles. About 145,000 of CMP’s 655,000 poles are nearing the end of their lifespan and will need to be replaced in the near future, the company said.

WHAT ABOUT RATES?

It’s not clear what impact the proposal could have on the utility’s more than 600,000 customers.

CMP is not yet able to determine the proposal’s average cost to ratepayers, Breed said. He noted that the current plan is subject to change and that other costs — like those associated with storms two to three years ago — will fluctuate during its implementation.

“That will be a discussion, I think, in six months that we’ll have,” he said.

Public Advocate Heather Sanborn, however, called the requested revenue hike “eye-popping” in a written statement and accused the company of prioritizing its profits over affordability.

“‘Predictable’ rates aren’t a benefit to Mainers if they are just predictably unaffordable,” Sanborn said. “Reining in our electricity distribution costs is more critical than ever at a time when Mainers are being encouraged to switch their heating and transportation needs over to electricity to meet climate change goals. None of those goals will be achievable if power delivery costs are allowed to spiral out of control.”

In a written response to the Office of the Public Advocate’s critiques, Breed said CMP designed the plan “with customer affordability in mind” and will work to balance necessary upgrades with cost concerns.

NEXT STEPS

The company plans to submit a formal request to the Public Utilities Commission in September, it wrote in a notice to the commission last week. The proposal is tentatively slated to take effect around October 2026.

Once CMP makes its formal request, customers will receive a notice of the proposal with details on how to provide feedback, said PUC Chair Philip L. Bartlett II. Customers can provide written comments, and the commission will schedule a number of public hearings to provide feedback in person.

“We will very carefully look at all the evidence before making any decision,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett said the commission rarely approves a utility’s entire rate change request, and the complexity of CMP’s proposal leaves room for negotiation and change. By statute, the commission can take up to one year to review rate requests, he said.

“This is going to be a big, complicated case, so it’s not one that I expect to move super fast,” Bartlett said. “It’s a long slog, this process.”

CMP is the state’s largest utility, with more than 640,000 customers across southern and central Maine. It last increased rates at the start of this month, increasing customers’ monthly bills by an average of about $5, largely to recover previous storm costs.

Counting several recent rate changes, the average CMP customer’s bill has risen from about $138.76 in July 2024 to about $154.67 this month.