CENTRAL MAINE • December 22, 2025
To protect Maine people and our environment, state regulators need to push back on Central Maine Power’s massive electricity rate increase and flawed mitigation plan for its transmission corridor. CMP wants to collect an additional $1.4 billion from Maine ratepayers The Public Utilities Commission denied CMP’s rate plan. But CMP will return. Also, CMP had years to develop a required conservation plan but came back with a junker — 50,000 acres of some of the most heavily harvested forestland in Maine, with almost no mature trees and little protection for the few remaining older trees still standing. CMP told regulators to wait 40 years for tall trees to return. Despite the flaws, DEP approved it and wrote that future regulators should ignore the precedent. We should not be hit by electricity price hikes tied to CMP’s profit-seeking, nor should we be left holding the short end of the stick, literally, with a lousy NECEC mitigation plan. ~ Tony Owens, Cape Elizabeth, and Lois Winter, Portland