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Kimberly N. Lindlof is the president and CEO of the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce.
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 — LD 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 utilities perform to our expectations.
This governor’s bill did many meaningful things, like establish a utility “performance report card” that would impose financial consequences on Central Maine Power and Versant Power 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 commission and the utilities work to implement her sweeping reform bill, the Legislature is now considering a brand-new idea: LD 2172, performance-based rate design.
Or are they? On first pass, much of this proposed legislation is highly duplicative of LD 1959. It’s also fairly ambiguous, placing more administrative cost, uncertainty and burden on the utilities commission at a time when it already has 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 I believe this bill will make that task harder. 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 address.
In its current form, and with so much at stake, we must give the utilities commission time so it can do its job by implementing the laws we already have on the books, including LD 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 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 LD 1959, and rather than passing LD 2172, a law that is so duplicative, the Legislature should allow the utilities commission the time it needs to do its job.