Rebecca Schultz is senior advocate for climate and clean energy at the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

With federal policy rollbacks hampering investment in homegrown clean energy, we need to look for areas where Maine can make progress now to bring down electricity prices and curb climate pollution.

One of the most promising and proven solutions is time-of-use (TOU) electricity rates, which encourage electricity use when the grid is less busy, empowering customers to save and keeping expensive fossil-fuel power plants offline.

Here’s how it works.

The cost of electricity fluctuates over the day and seasons of the year. The most expensive times are when consumer demand is high; it’s basic economics. This summer, for example, wholesale prices have exceeded $1,000/MWh, more than 2,000% higher than average prices. These true costs are hidden from consumers by an antiquated practice of averaging prices across all hours, an approach that unfairly shifts costs to those causing the least impact on our shared electricity grid.

Well-thought-out TOU rates can fix this and save working families in Maine money in three ways.

First, they would reduce the stress on our regional electricity system, bringing down costs for everyone. Our grid — all the poles, wires and substations that we pay for through our electricity bills — is sized to match maximum demand for electricity, even if that peak period is only a few hours a year.

Incentivizing use during off-peak times keeps expensive infrastructure upgrades at bay and makes more efficient use of the capacity we already have. New England’s grid operator found that reducing peak loads would save roughly $10 billion across the region, with nearly a billion of that coming to Maine.

Second, creating a more flexible grid with solutions like TOU rates will deliver additional savings from our local transmission and distribution systems. Maine’s recent Pathways to 2040 study found that these Maine-based approaches could reduce grid growth by 35-55% by 2050, with huge implications for costs savings to Maine homes and businesses over the next 25 years.

Third, it’s not just poles and wires but the electricity itself that gets more expensive — and more polluting — as demand increases. In New England’s electricity market, the least expensive power plants come online first. The last resource to be fired up is the most expensive and sets a uniform price paid to all generators. By shifting use away from peak times, we use those expensive resources more rarely, lowering market prices across the board.

As a bonus, the most expensive generators are also the most polluting. By relying less on these outdated coal- and oil-fired clunkers, we reduce climate pollution and improve air quality.

Because TOU rates have been around for decades, there’s a wealth of information about the scale of benefits at stake. One recent program in Maryland saved customers an average of 5-10% off their electricity bills by reducing summer peaks. This included lower-income people who responded similarly to higher-income households to shift their electricity usage and save money.

Maine’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is considering a TOU proposal now, and it should make this a priority so we can deliver savings to families and businesses across the state. Maine’s TOU rates should be simple and clear, with a higher price during an evening window and a lower price the rest of the time, with good outreach and education to let people know how to save money on their bills by doing laundry and running the dishwashers outside those hours.

Any time changes in electricity rate structures are proposed, people have questions. And to be clear, there are important details to work out. But because TOU has been implemented effectively elsewhere, we have confidence the PUC can address these questions while moving forward and bringing these cost savings to bear quickly.

Effective TOU rates can offer Maine families short-term savings, while suppressing rates system-wide over the long term. If we’re serious about addressing affordability while achieving Maine’s Climate Action Plan, well-designed time-of-use rates are a foundational policy and too important an opportunity to pass up.