As a Mainer who put solar panels on the roof of my family’s home, I’d like to offer my perspective on the ruckus over net energy billing.

When we built our home 23 years ago, we wanted to include solar to reduce pollution and fight climate change but couldn’t afford it. By 2017, the price of panels had fallen so far we dusted off our dream of generating clean electricity. It was still expensive, but with the federal tax credit and the net energy billing promise of getting credit on our electric bill for every surplus kilowatt-hour we produced, it became a smart investment.

But we weren’t motivated just by the benefits of clean energy. Our electricity provider, Central Maine Power, had been bought out by a multinational corporation, Iberdrola, and service was declining. As self-employed entrepreneurs with home-based businesses, we couldn’t afford frequent outages. And our monthly bills were getting ridiculous. We considered going off grid but decided against it knowing net energy billing would lower our bills and make our excess power available for others to use.

Since then we’ve seen the cost of electricity skyrocket. We still buy power during the winter when production drops. Believe it or not, even during the summer when we generate excess power, CMP still charges us nearly $30 per month for the privilege of being grid-tied.

While the utility corporations have long fought against rooftop solar and net energy billing, relentlessly pushing the tale of “Joe and Jane ratepayer,” who can’t afford their own solar, subsidizing the rich coastal elites’ rooftop solar, this has reached a fever pitch.

And not without some justification. Our net energy billing policy got pulled out of whack by a well-intentioned but misguided Legislature when it enacted a new policy in 2019 to encourage solar farm development. The “tariff rate” portion of net energy billing, aimed at large-scale solar farms rather than homeowners and small cooperatives, ended up drawing out-of-state investors looking to capitalize on the opportunity. CMP and Versant claimed this was costing them significant money and passed these costs on to ratepayers.

In 2023, the Legislature reformed net energy billing to address this issue, but the idea that net energy billing is the reason our electric bills are so high had been firmly established in the public’s perception.

But is NEB really the primary cause of our inflated bills? Getting rid of net energy billing would do nothing to address the soaring supply costs that bind us to a volatile fossil fuel market. In fact, the more clean energy we generate here in Maine, the less vulnerable we’ll be to those fluctuating market prices.

Also, a big factor in recent bill increases is the storm damage recovery costs that CMP and Versant are passing on to ratepayers. CMP has a well-documented history of inflated and poorly documented requests for storm damage reimbursement.

Another big driver of Maine’s unaffordable electricity bills is the relentless extraction of heavy profits by CMP and Versant. In 2023, together they took $223.4 million out of our pockets to enrich shareholders and executives — $4.3 million each week. CMP’s transmission and delivery rate is now 12.8 cents, up 64% since 2014, while customers in Versant’s Bangor Hydro District are paying an incredible 15.7 cents for delivery. Just for comparison, customers in Nebraska — which has no corporate utilities — are paying 7.85 cents total this winter for their electricity, including supply.

Last year the Maine Public Utilities Commission commissioned a report to assess the costs and benefits of net energy billing, which concluded that the benefits —  including reduced carbon emissions, lower supply prices, avoided transmission and distribution upgrades, less line loss from transmission — outweigh the costs.

We should look at ways to improve net energy billing, to minimize impacts on ratepayers, and to give low-income Mainers access to renewable energy. Everyone benefits if homeowners and locally owned small-scale cooperatives invest in renewable energy. Getting rid of net energy billing entirely would be a big mistake and cost us more in the long term.