The most important climate bill in the current legislative session doesn’t even have the word “climate” in it. I write to urge Gov. Mills and our legislators to support L.D. 1646, An Act to Restore Local Ownership and Control of Maine’s Power Delivery Systems.
There are many compelling reasons to support this bill, which would buy out Central Maine Power and Emera Maine and replace them with a consumer-owned utility: Ratepayer savings. Better customer service. Ensuring that our grid is managed with safety and efficiency, and not profit-making, as the ultimate goal.
I support L.D. 1646 for all of those reasons, but even more importantly because CMP has been a climate obstructionist in recent years, lobbying to narrowly defeat renewable-energy bills for three straight years from 2016 through 2018.
If we are going to truly make strides in decarbonizing the grid in the coming years, we need to take dinosaurs CMP and Emera out of the picture and replace them with a consumer-owned utility, represented by a variety of local stakeholders, that would see beyond its fiscal bottom line on every climate-related question.
Rob Levin
Portland
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