The Maine State Legislature has done its work to address the threat of a total collapse of the electric grid from GMD, an extreme geomagnetic solar storm (or geomagnetic disturbance), so powerful and widespread it would black out Maine, the whole Northeast, Atlantic seaboard, or even the nation for months or years — but work remains. LD 1363, legislation sponsored by David Miramant of Camden, would have required CMP to install protections on the grid to allow it to recover quickly. Without protections, it could not survive. Studies have been done by the Public Utilities Commission, first responders, insurance companies, and independent national experts. Sen. Miramant sums up the results this way: “We have identified a problem, we have a solution, so we need to just fix it.” We are in a pre-Katrina moment. Everyone knows we need to build the dikes, but will we?

A GMD is a powerful super storm of charged particles that comes hurtling through space at us from the sun, blasting into the magnetic fields that surround the earth, and sending big power surges through the electric grid, causing fires and burning out everything connected to the system. It reaches everyone. Solar activity is constant.

Loss of electric power for months or years is not practically survivable, because the critical extra high voltage transformers that control the flow of electricity throughout the State would be destroyed or badly damaged. They come from other countries and take up to 2 years to deliver in normal times, and we have no spares. There are even manmade EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapons that can have the same effect, and worse, that are a particular concern of the military. For all these reasons and the losses they would bring about, prevention of grid collapse is the only credible protection. The alternative is unthinkable.

LD 1363 would have required CMP to install protective power surge blockers on their extra high voltage transformers, their most critical transmission equipment. There are 15 of them. They cost about $10 million each, or a total of $150 million. The blockers attach to them, and automatically block dangerous surging currents. They’ve been tested and proven effective by Idaho National Laboratory. Their cost is $2.3 million, total, if Maine accepts the offer currently on the table, about $4 million installed. If CMP financed it over 5 years, cost to ratepayers would be 60 cents per person, per year; if over the 20- year life of the blockers, 15 cents per person per year. We can afford that.

LD 1363 passed in the House, by a strong bipartisan vote. It lost in the Senate by a single vote, unfortunately along party lines. Only two Republicans, Sen. Burns and Sen. Whittemore, supported it. Thus, we have no law in place to require CMP to install protections and ensure the safety of the public. Their lobbyists won, senators succumbed, and everyone else lost — an old political story.

The industry has been fighting protective reliability standards at the national level for years. Do you know a big solar storm can cause death? The utilities know. Does that bother you?

People wonder why the electric companies don’t want to protect their business, their profits, but there’s no clear answer. They talk probabilities, but this is a 100 percent probable event. They say they don’t need a higher standard of protection, but their own data show otherwise. They don’t want to be regulated, but they are a monopoly, transferring their business risks to ratepayers to pick up the costs of massive losses, while CMP has blanket liability protection. It’s not a cost issue. The surge blockers would cost $2.3 million, but CMP includes as a viable option equipment, that has not been proven effective for severe solar storms, that cost $42 million. Either way, they get an 11.74 percent guaranteed rate of return on their investment, paid by customers; $42 million earns them $4,930,000, $2.3 million earns $270,000.

Fortunately, the manufacturer has left the offer on the table for now, so there is still time to consider it. CMP could pick it up on its own. Alternatively, the governor or PUC could order them to pick it up. Do you think they will? Do you think they should? Does it bother you that they haven’t already? Maybe they should hear from you? They’ve heard from me.

Do you think anyone cares? I do, especially those people up on the poles.

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Andrea Boland is a former State Representative from Sanford and introduced the first GMD and EMP legislation in the nation to pass, LD 131, in 2013.