by Gerry Runte and Kay Aikin, CEO Dynamic Grid
(published in the Portland Press Herald, August 5, 2026)
Electricity rate hikes are on everyone’s mind. Much of what utilities seek pays for equipment upgrades and replacements. A transformer might make the list because forecasts or actual experience say it will near its limit for several hours a year, but has room to spare the rest of the year. If its replacement is approved, the cost stays on customers’ bills for decades.
That transformer captures a problem Maine has never seriously confronted: we plan the grid to serve peak demand but make almost no coordinated effort to reduce those peaks instead of buying new equipment. We treat demand as something to serve rather than manage, and doing so may be the single largest untapped source of savings on Maine bills.
Some of the tools needed already sit in Maine homes and businesses. Heat pumps can be briefly cycled during a peak, electric vehicles charged in off-hours, batteries discharged when nearby equipment is stressed and big customers’ operations shifted. Coordinated in real time, these resources can shave the very peaks that drive construction.
Today they are a few limited programs that attempt to manage demand, but no single entity orchestrates them as grid resources. So Maine keeps sizing infrastructure to a handful of peak hours without asking whether those hours can be reduced at lower cost.
It is playing out now. CMP has asked the Maine Public Utilities Commission to raise the delivery portion of bills to fund a large program of grid upgrades. One of us testified in that case for the Office of the Public Advocate, after reviewing hour-by-hour loading data for the circuits and transformers slated for near-term work.
For most of those circuits, the data raised substantial questions about whether the upgrades must be built on the proposed timeline. That does not mean the projects will never be needed, however there may be different solutions to replacement: manage and lower that demand when it happens, rather than rebuild the equipment.
Where construction is genuinely required, the Commission should still require a project-specific demonstration of need. Building years too early is expensive even when a project is eventually justified.
When rates rise, the public instinct is to go after utility profit, which deserves scrutiny. But it is a small slice. The larger number is the investment that profit is a return on. Every avoidable dollar of construction costs customers not just the profit on it but the construction itself, the financing and the taxes. Trimming the profit rate helps at the margin; not building what you don’t need is the bigger lever.
Every upgrade rests on a forecast built on judgment, and Efficiency Maine Trust’s testimony identified choices that may make projected demand look higher than experience supports. Utilities need to plan carefully, but layer enough cautious assumptions and a forecast tips into overstatement.
The Commission should establish forecasting methods and assumptions in advance, with consumer advocates and independent experts at the table, and apply the same methodology to grid plans and rate cases, settling disputes before projects reach approval.
The next administration’s energy strategy should make coordinated demand management a normal part of running the grid, with utilities marshaling customer-owned and third-party resources to reduce peaks, defer upgrades and maintain reliability, aided by modern control technology that squeezes more capacity from existing equipment.
Demand-side options should be weighed against construction on the same terms: cost, performance and reliability. A transformer that exceeds its limits a few hours a year is where a lower-cost option deserves a hard look first.
One more change makes the rest work. Utilities earn primarily by building and owning equipment, so capital projects get priority. Maine should give utilities a reasonable opportunity to profit when they deliver verified savings or avoid unnecessary construction, not only when they build, and develop a compensation model that balances the two.
None of this is an argument against investment, or against CMP. Maine will need substantial investment to improve reliability, withstand severe weather and serve growing demand. It is an argument for managing demand before building for it, and for building on evidence rather than assumption.
The next governor’s first major energy test may already be on the docket. How Maine answers it will help decide whether the grid we pay for is the grid we need.