During the governor’s recent visit to Biddeford for a town hall meeting, I was pleased to play host. I arranged for the Biddeford High School Singers to perform our National Anthem, and with help of The Heart of Biddeford, arranged a gift basket with items from Reilly’s Bakery, Angelrox, Desert Moon Leather and Engine’s FabLab. I know he really appreciated it. But that didn’t mean he went easy on the Legislature. In fact, he was pretty hard on us for all manner of energy policy failures.

I took it personally. I’m a member of the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee in the Legislature. We’re responsible for setting energy policy for the state. I understand some of the things the governor says are for political benefit and not necessarily meant to be true, but Maine citizens deserve to know the facts. So let me take on the governor’s talking points – which I suspect are familiar to many of you by now – one by one:

We need to bring in cheap Canadian hydro power

HydroQuebec is not a charity. They are not going to sell us power at a below market price. They’ll sell us power, but only when it benefits them, not us … and since the Canadians are not part of our electrical grid, we could not reliably predict when their power would be available. If Quebec runs short of power, they could just shut us off. Ironically, this could actually make our power supply more expensive. And here’s the topper: there is no major power line between Maine and Quebec. To build one would be very expensive and very controversial. Plus, the Canadian power grid is DC, unlike our AC system. So, to summarize, up to 400 miles of the tallest new high voltage electrical line will have to be built, at an estimated cost of more than $4 million per mile plus millions more for the DC to AC converter stations, to bring in power that might be available to us some of the time. Let’s get right on that.

Paper mills are closing because of high energy costs

Wholesale electricity is available at some of the lowest prices of all time right now. Legislative initiatives, notably the 2013 Omnibus Energy Act and our steady and strategic funding of power-saving energy efficiency in businesses and homes, have helped bring about this decrease in prices. The real problem in energy prices is rising transmission and delivery costs – the cost of the poles and wires, not the cost of the power. But the governor never mentions that.

Maine should rely on nuclear energy

Often in the halls of the Legislature we like to talk about power that is “dispatchable,” which is intended to mean that it’s always available. That’s because users are unpredictable. Who knows, you might want to turn on your floodlights in the middle of the night to see what’s making your dog bark. If you do, somewhere out there on the grid, there needs to be electricity being generated, or nothing will happen when you flip the switch. But it’s also important that we can turn electrical generation off when we don’t need it, in order to reduce costs. However, nuclear plants are not flexible in that way. You can’t just stop splitting atoms when everyone turns off the Red Sox game.

Subsidies for renewable energy are raising your prices

When you read “renewable energy” I bet you thought solar power and wind power. But more than 90 percent of the incentives in Maine’s renewable energy credit market go to biomass energy generation. This industry, which burns wood chips to make electricity, is part of the fabric of our state. However, this energy is arguably not renewable and definitely not cheap. It’s also very tied to our logging industry, and much of this program has benefited our paper mills. The governor has been a big advocate of biomass funding, so I don’t think he can say this one with a straight face. The truth is the biggest single subsidy provided by electric ratepayers recently is a $75 million fund created in 2013 at the request of the governor to buy natural gas – not renewables.

So what do I think we should do? Next month, I’ll discuss a series of proposals that I believe will lock in today’s low prices for the future while helping protect us from the return of high priced oil.

— State Rep. Martin Grohman, D-Biddeford, represents House District 12, which includes part of Biddeford.