Heating oil in Maine has hit a record, averaging more than $6 a gallon, and that is bad news for the half of the state’s households that burn it in their boilers and furnaces. Electricity is no kinder. Prices have climbed at the third-highest rate in the country over the past decade. Mainers choose a new governor in November, and the bill for keeping warm now sits alongside the bill for a changing climate.
The climate side is not abstract. Swings between heavy rain and drought are making farming harder. Warmer conditions are squeezing plants and animals, including lobster, which matters to the state’s economy. Rising seas and worse storms are eating at the coast and damaging infrastructure.
Three candidates, one shared priority
All three contenders call affordability a priority, and all accept that the climate is changing. Where they split is on whether the two problems can be solved together.
Democrat Hannah Pingree and independent Rick Bennett say they can. Pingree told The Maine Monitor in September that she would carry on the work of the Maine Climate Council, which drew up a plan to meet the clean energy and emissions targets set by the Legislature. “To not do that is going to put lives at risk,” she said. She co-chaired the council while directing the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future from 2019 to 2025, and oversaw two versions of the climate plan.
Republican Bobby Charles wants government to focus squarely on cost and to back renewables and fossil fuels alike, including new natural gas pipelines.
Where Maine stands
Maine and Washington, D.C. are the only places currently ahead of pace to cut greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent by 2030. Heat pumps explain much of that. Rebates encouraged them, and both parties embraced them.
Anthony Moffa, a University of Maine law professor who studies climate policy, said states stepped in when the federal government pulled back during the first Trump administration, and Maine led the way. The Legislature set up the Climate Council in 2019, and its plan, “Maine Won’t Wait,” has been “a model document” for other states, he said. A 2025 update requires Maine to get all its electricity from renewable or other low-emissions sources, nuclear included, by 2040. Moffa noted that lawmakers can set goals, but the governor directs the agencies that turn them into programs.
Pingree: more clean supply, less imported fuel
Pingree wants more clean power through projects such as the Northern Maine Renewable Energy Program, which aims to build utility-scale generation and transmission in Aroostook County. Locals have raised concerns, and she said the governor should work with the Department of Energy Resources, the Public Utilities Commission and the Public Advocate so that “actual community voices are heard.” She also wants Maine to burn less oil and gas, most of which arrives from abroad. “We have no energy independence,” she said. The wars between Russia and Ukraine and, more recently, the United States and Iran have disrupted gas and oil supplies.
About half of a Maine electricity bill pays for supply and the rest for transmission and distribution. Pingree wants the Commission to resist what she calls “excessive rate hikes” and wants more homes weatherized. She breaks with Gov. Janet Mills on Wabanaki sovereignty, which she supports, and on data centers, where she backs a moratorium on large-scale development. The Maine Conservation Voters Action Fund has endorsed her.
Bennett: ratepayers first
Bennett shares most of Pingree’s positions. “There’s really no reason why we can’t have both,” he told the Monitor. His distinctive idea is a “generation authority” to handle demand from other states for Maine-made renewable power and make sure Maine benefits. He said ratepayers come first, even while Connecticut and Massachusetts want supply. He sees transportation as the lagging sector. He would also pause data center development until there are ground rules. Beyond that, he wants to court industry with special rates for manufacturers, wider tax credits for forest products companies making biofuels, and new business in underused corners of the grid where mills have closed. He holds an 85 percent score on the Maine Conservation Voters scorecard.
Charles: “all of the above”
Charles calls affordability “the number one issue” and says Maine’s energy costs are “incomprehensibly high.” He blames the Mills administration’s incentives for solar and wind, net energy billing in particular, for pushing up bills. He accepts that climate change is real but argues Maine’s emissions are a drop in the global bucket. He would keep the four Kennebec River dams that Brookfield Energy sold to The Nature Conservancy generating power rather than removing them for migratory fish. He would lobby other states to allow the Constitution pipeline and an expansion of the Iroquois pipeline, which he says would add to New England’s gas supply, and he would fill the Public Utilities Commission with engineers and economists. On data centers he calls himself “agnostic.”
What the experts say
Experts agree that costs must come down but not on how. Jeff Marks of ClimateWork Maine, who served at the former state energy office from 2010 to 2012, argues that reliable, affordable power means investing in clean energy now. He called the race “a true Goldilocks campaign,” with many voters seeing Pingree’s policies as too strong, Charles’s as too weak and Bennett’s as just right.
Patrick Woodcock, now head of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and a former energy office director under Gov. Paul LePage, sees it differently. “The next governor is really going to be limited unless we address our electricity pricing,” he said. High prices, he argued, have undercut the case for replacing heating oil and eroded business confidence, given the state’s heavy winter demand and tight supply. He wants resources left to compete. He praised the spread of heat pumps but called Maine’s solar incentives “overly generous” and a “cautionary tale.”
