Public Power in Maine

Some citizens in Maine and a portion of the state government wants to buy and combine into a single public power company, all of the Investor Owned Utilities.

On the flight home yesterday I started thinking about how daunting that will be.

1) A law needs to be passed to start the ball rolling
2) Bonds need to be issued to buy out the owners, billions of dollars in bonds, at today's interest rates, well beyond the current bonding authority on Maine.
3) A price needs to be settled on with each of the owners, there is no Federal forcing function in law, that let's Maine set a price, and likely if maine forces the transition, there will be lawsuits for decades.
4) Maine needs to set new salary and hourly permissible pay rates that will be higher than the government normally pays to keep skilled Line personnel, and engineers, not to mention a managing director and key executives.
5) Maine needs to put on a charm offensive to keep key people imported into the state to run some critical technical operations.
6) Maine needs to combine some very different cultures between the utilities. This will be hard, because there are some rivalries, even at the hourly worker level between the utilities.
7) Maine needs to then build new generation in the state (more bonds) to meet the energy needs.
8) Maine needs to reform its state regulations to reflect the fact that the regulator and the utility are now both owned by the state. The dynamic of that regulatory environment need to change to be close to Quebec than New York.
9) Maine will have to explain why either state taxes or the price of electricity are rising, since one of the early advocate statements was that power would be cheaper after the state owned the utilities, and with all the bonding at the current higher interest rates (and likely even higher with Maine's risk levels on such a large debt).

I don't see an emerging leader in Maine that can navigate the move to public power. I worry that the effort will spend a lot of state money and focus will little or nothing to show for it, when people need to be focused on the transition. I look at Boulder, CO and wonder if Maine will end up in the same outcome after 15 years of effort and distractions.