Central Maine Power’s $30 million federal grant to strengthen electric grid resilience and reliability is but a down payment on what is shaping up as a costly project to respond to climate change and more storms.

The utility, which serves more than 650,000 electricity customers in central and southern Maine, says the money from Washington will accelerate its use of smart grid technology to help reduce the frequency and impact of power outages following storms. The funding will pay for 300 automated devices to be installed on roadside poles and wires, said Adam Desrosiers, vice president of electric operations at CMP.

Desrosiers compared the device to a home circuit breaker that works on CMP’s distribution system when there’s an outage, allowing it to rebalance quickly using autonomous controls. The equipment will detect a problem and de-energize the system, helping workers to remotely restore power faster, he said.

The limited number of the devices already in service has restored power this year to about 74,000 customers in less than five minutes, he said.

They will be increasingly important as Mainers depend more on electricity for heat pumps and transportation and as more distributed energy resources such as solar power are added to the grid. The equipment will help rapidly cut restoration times, Desrosiers said.

By the end of this year, CMP is expected to have interconnected 500 megawatts of solar power, representing enough electricity to power 100,000 Maine homes, he said.

About 2,000 of the devices will be needed in the coming decade. And they will come at a cost.

CMP has a service territory of 11,000 square miles and with each device costing an average of $100,000, the total cost potentially is $200 million, Desrosiers said. To raise revenue, the utility has built out a plan in its current and future rate cases and will consider other grant opportunities, Desrosiers said.

State utility regulators in June approved a two-year, $67 million rate plan for CMP that contributes to an upgrade of the grid to increase reliability, resist storm damage linked to a changing climate, and accommodate clean energy investments. The plan increased a typical home’s electric bill by a little more than 1%, or $1.67, this past summer and will increase it by about $5 a month by the middle of 2025.

The revenue increases help pay for operations and maintenance, but are largely driven by rising capital spending forecast by CMP from 2023 to 2025, the PUC said.

If CMP does not spend the full amount allocated for investments, its revenue increases will be subsequently reduced, according to the rate decision. CMP told regulators it expects to spend $11.5 million this year for system automation and $72 million from 2023 to 2026; it’s part of an $805.6 million capital spending program forecast over the three years for modernization, system operations, resiliency, and other programs.

CMP invested $260 million in Maine last year, with a portion used for large resiliency upgrades, Desrosiers said. That spending paid for automation devices, substations, and transformers, he said.

Public Advocate William Harwood said in an email he will ask the PUC to require the utility to include the federal grant in the accounting of its capital spending. The automation devices will be a good investment if they reduce the frequency and duration of costly power outages, he said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the federal outlays for grid infrastructure and supporting projects to harden systems and improve reliability and affordability are the largest ever direct investment in the grid. She cited extreme weather events fueled by climate change that will “strain the nation’s aging transmission systems.”

Maine’s federal funding is part of a $3.5 billion package for 58 projects in 44 states, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The projects will leverage more than $8 billion in federal and private money, the agency said. It’s funded by the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.

OUTAGES UP SHARPLY IN 2022

An average electricity customer was without power for 16 hours last year, nearly triple the annual outage time in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. Maine’s 2022 performance time was longer than in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island and about the same as in Vermont.

The average power outage lasted about five hours last year, compared with about two hours in 2021.

News of the federal funding arrives at a contentious time for CMP.

The Augusta-based utility and Versant Power, Maine’s other investor-owned utility, are fighting a Nov. 7 ballot measure calling for a publicly owned and controlled utility to buy their assets and replace the for-profit companies. Advocates for establishing a new utility say Maine’s transmission and distribution systems will require costly upgrades and a nonprofit such as Pine Tree Power, as the proposed utility is called, would tap capital markets at a lower interest rate than would investor-owned utilities.

Seth Berry, a former House chair of the Legislature’s Energy, Utilities, and Technology Committee who is now advocating for Pine Tree Power, said another advantage to public power utility is that the Federal Energy Management Agency compensates nonprofits at least 75% of costs to restore power following storms.

He said he hopes CMP uses the federal money better  “than the last time Uncle Sam paid for new CMP smart meters.”

Smart meter communication was interrupted by an October 2017 storm, contributing to confusion about where power was out and where it was restored. The digital meters, which transmit information over a wireless network, were installed in 2011 for $200 million, funded equally by a federal grant and customer charges.

More than 450,000 CMP customers lost power at some point during the storm. Problems with CMP’s communications exacerbated the problem and hundreds of angry customers filed complaints about high bills and poor customer service in the following months.

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