Pine Tree Power Will Empower Us
About this blog:
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I’m Sarah Miller, a semi-retired international energy and business journalist and editor, and now a Camden resident. Having spent a career learning about old energy, I’ve turned to new energy in recent years. In doing so, I’ve come to see how important fossil fuels and the way they work were to the structure of 19th and 20th Century economies and societies. I’ve also started to imagine what cleaner, more distributed energy forms could mean for the structure of 21st Century economies and societies. The climate crisis is frightening, but the energy and social transitions that accompany it can bring us a better world -- if communities like ours here on the Midcoast work in a bottom-up, “distributed” way to make it so. That’s what Tales from the Transition is all about.
I am active in the community through the Camden Energy and Sustainability Committee, the Camden Philosophical Society, the board of Bay Chamber Concerts and Music School, and the climate activist group Climate Matters Maine. I am a former president of the Camden Conference. The views expressed in this blog, however, are strictly my own.
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Before moving to Camden, I spent 40-some years reporting and editing about international energy issues. One thing I didn’t hear much about over those decades was the “customer base” of the big companies I covered, from oil majors like ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco to electric utilities such as Spain’s Iberdrola and its US counterparts. Such firms don’t know or care – or talk to journalists -- about their customers. They know about commodity markets, big investors, and Wall Street analysts. They care about making money.
They don’t have to care about customers, because their customers have no choice. They need the gasoline, or natural gas, or electricity these companies sell, and they have to pay what it costs. That goes for Opec. It goes for Exxon. And it goes for Iberdrola-owned Central Maine Power (CMP).
Recently, CMP has shown every sign of caring what the people of Maine think, because its license to make money delivering electricity to Mainers is on the line. But don’t be fooled by all the ads and flyers. They care about us as voters. They don’t care about us as customers any more than they ever did or ever will.
Our Opportunity
Next week we Mainers have an unusual opportunity. By voting “yes” on Ballot Question 3, we can take control of our electricity grid and decide within Maine and our Midcoast communities how reliable we want our power supply to be, and what kind and speed of transition we want off fossil fuels and onto renewable electricity.
We can vote to establish a customer-owned utility called Pine Tree Power to replace CMP and its companion for-profit Maine utility Versant, which is ultimately owned – oddly enough – by the City of Calgary, nearly 3,000 miles away in the province of Alberta just east of Rockies.
A reminder: This is only about replacing the companies that own and operate Maine’s “grid,” the wires and other infrastructure that deliver electricity to businesses and homes in this state. These utilities cannot by law generate electricity.
Odds are Pine Tree Power will be able to deliver electricity to us cheaper than CMP and Versant, however it’s generated. Pine Tree will be able to borrow money for the buyout and other purposes at lower interest rates than private owners because it can issue tax-free bonds akin to municipal bonds, and it will not be forwarding 8%-12% profit margins to shareholders.
A detailed plan exists for managing the buyout and handling the inevitable court challenges. A detailed plan exists for electing the Pine Tree Board and making it answerable to customers. All this has been more than four years in the making and is in the public domain. Forget what the flyers from CMP say.
Most Important
But the really important thing is that Pine Tree Power will belong to and be answerable to us, its customers. Its roots will be in our communities, and its best interest will lie in keeping us satisfied. If you want lots of rooftop solar and microgrids, Pine Tree has every reason to help you get that – contrary to CMP and Versant, which benefit from keeping their rate bases intact. If you want community solar, Pine Tree won’t be motivated to stall and make it expensive to connect your facility to the grid, as we’ve seen the for-profit utilities do.
And if you don’t have or don’t want solar, Pine Tree will be better positioned to find a rate structure that doesn’t penalize you. You will be one of their customer-owners just like the folks with solar panels.
This referendum is being watched across the US. A vote for Pine Tree will encourage others states and communities to take control of their energy systems. That would be great, but also secondary. The greatest thing of all is what it would give us Mainers: control over our own energy system at this vital time of energy transition.
(A version of this article ran earlier in the opinion section of the Bangor Daily News).
