Accountability and Affordability Must Be at the Center of Efforts to Scrutinize CMP’s Rate Increase
On Friday April 17, Central Maine Power (CMP) filed its latest proposal to increase Mainers’ electricity bills.
As we review the company’s filing, the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) will be focused on two ways to reduce electricity prices while steering the state toward a clean, affordable, and reliable energy future:
- Reducing CMP’s corporate profits; and
- Reforming how CMP gets paid for storm response.
You may remember this all started last year when CMP wanted to collect an additional $1.7 billion from electricity customers over 5 years, adding $420 a year to household bills, while giving itself $700 million in profit.
It is hard to imagine how CMP thought that was something its customers could shoulder at this time of rising costs and uncertainty.
We joined with other clean energy groups and hundreds of Mainers in opposing CMP’s request. Fortunately, the case was unanimously rejected by our Public Utilities Commissioners on the basis of it being unreasonably skewed toward the interests of CMP’s investors.
In dismissing CMP’s rate request, Maine regulators were loud and clear that affordability needs to be front of mind, and any future rate increases need to result in “meaningful benefits” to customers. “CMP’s proposal does not seem to reflect a serious consideration of the ability of customers to pay for all of this,” Commissioner Patrick Scully said, seemingly baffled in deliberations last November.¹
Now CMP is back with a new ask.
This time the company wants to increase rates to collect an extra $190 some million per year ($189-198 million) from Maine families and businesses, adding about $18 per month or more than $200 per year to average bills.
CMP also wants to exploit a rarely used section of law intended for emergencies to fast track $70 million ($70-73 million) of that increase starting this summer.
This is a canny maneuver intended to mask the impact of its rate hike behind a different adjustment related to storm costs also occurring this summer. That adjustment would have put $11 back into the pockets of customers every month. Instead, the company is proposing to keep $7 and only give back $4.
So when CMP is spinning its rate hike as a proposal that “would lower bills by $4 per month,” the truth is that it’s jacking up bills by $7 this July and another $11 next May—when customers are actually owed $11 per month in relief due to a thankfully mild 2025 storm season.
Where does NRCM stand on CMP’s latest bid to increase rates?
NRCM supports reasonable efforts to build a stronger, cleaner grid that powers Maine’s economy as we forge a pathway off expensive and polluting fossil fuels toward long-term affordability and Maine-made clean energy. And we want to see CMP grow its Maine-based workforce with quality, family-sustaining union jobs, rather than rely on expensive out-of-state contractors to get the lights back on after storms.
Smart investments combined with forceful oversight and accountability by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) are vital to bringing our outdated electric system up to a standard that can meet the challenge of decarbonization. We know there are better, cheaper ways to get there than what the utility is proposing.
It will take some time to work through the hundreds of pages of testimony and spreadsheets that CMP hasfiled with the PUC as supporting evidence to justify its proposal. As we review the company’s request, we’ll be focused on improvements that reduce corporate profits and reform how CMP gets paid for storm response, so we can reduce costs for regular Mainers and local businesses while steering the state toward a cleaner, more affordable and reliable energy future.
1. Reducing corporate profits reduces electricity bills for Mainers.
According to federal income filings, we know that roughly 14.2% of your bill goes straight to CMP’s corporate profits. After paying all expenses associated with operating, maintaining, and building a transmission and distribution utility, after paying all its employee salaries and benefits, after taxes and interest, the company takes home $24 of the average $168 household monthly bill.
These aren’t profits that get reinvested in Maine. CMP is no longer the local company it once was back when it didn’t rank worst in the nation on industry surveys year after year.
After a series of acquisitions that culminated in 2024, CMP is now 100% owned and controlled by the second largest utility on the planet, the Spanish energy giant Iberdrola, with petro-state Qatar as its largest shareholder and an estimated valuation of $156 billion—it’s a company roughly twice the size of Maine’s entire economy.
CMP’s profits don’t need to be so high. Because utilities are monopolies, state regulators get a chance to set their profit levels in rate cases like this one.
As part of this rate case, regulators at the PUC will determine the level of returns that CMP is allowed to earn on the capital investments it makes into the transmission and distribution infrastructure in Maine. These returns on capital expenditure, also called return on equity (ROE), directly affect profits.
Right now, that level is set at 9.3%. CMP is asking to increase its ROE to as high as 10%.
Compare that to the 5-8% annual earnings that everyday investors can expect from their 401Ks. So, while Mainers’ earnings are going down because of rising costs, CMP is brazenly asking for its profits to go up.
In theory, utilities are allowed to earn these returns to attract investors and compensate them for the risk they’re taking on in putting their money with the utility. But as energy costs escalate and the affordability crisis reverberates across the economy, these high ROE levels are increasingly coming under scrutiny.
Experts point to indicators of the true cost of raising capital to show that approved ROEs are generally much higher than they need to be. After all, regulated monopoly utilities have no competition for customers and are not very risky investments.
Estimates of how much U.S. customers are charged in excess of necessary profit levels range from $7 billion to $50 billion per year.
In a related case, the Federal government ruled last month that New England transmission companies, including CMP, have been charging exorbitant ROE levels for the last 15 years and must refund up to $1.5 billion to their customers.
Inflated ROE levels also create a perverse incentive to overinvest in costly capital upgrades, which also drives up rates.
NRCM will be formally intervening in CMP’s rate case, with a focus on establishing a fair and equitable ROE that better reflects utility risk and lowers utility bills for Maine people, while establishing alternative performance incentives that better align with a clean energy transition.
2. Reforming storm cost recovery will impose cost discipline and reallocate risk.
With increasingly severe weather fueled by climate change, storm costs are on the rise. For CMP, 2022, 2023, and 2024 were some of the most expensive years on record, averaging $180 million each year in incremental storm expenses.²
Under current practice, CMP’s storm costs are treated differently from regular utility business. Storm costs are expensed directly to ratepayers, reconciled annually and rolled into rates year-over-year, so anything CMP spends to restore the power grid after a year of storms gets charged to ratepayers like you and me the following year.
This has resulted in storm costs being the second largest driver of volatility in CMP’s electricity prices, behind our dependence on imported fossil fuels in the New England regional electricity market.
The practice of annual reconciliation protects CMP by putting climate risk squarely on the shoulders of Maine families and businesses.
Without incentive to control costs, this practice also leads to significant operational inefficiencies.
For instance, CMP relies on contracting out-of-state line workers and tree crews to get the lights back on. These emergency crews are in such high demand during regional weather events that contractors come in from as far as afield as Arkansas, Alabama, California and Canada. In anticipation of even a moderate storm, emergency crews are positioned around the state just in case they are needed.
That over-preparedness comes at a steep cost. In 2025, “an uncharacteristically calm” storm year with no major storms or prolonged outages, CMP claimed 57 storm events, costing $43 million.³
CMP knows there’s a better way. In its rate request from last fall, the company proposed hiring hundreds of union line workers to beef up in-house capacity to respond to storms and save money.
NRCM supports growing CMP’s workforce. And to get it done, we support a proposal from the Office of the Public Advocate that would eliminate the annual reconciliation and in its place internalize average storm costs into routine utility operations. This regulatory fix would give the company the flexibility and resources to make those operational decisions and seek lower-cost ways to get the lights back on within a reasonable timeframe.
While this approach is in effect and working well for Versant, it hasn’t been a popular proposal for CMP because despite expected overall savings, it will add to base rates. However, given the climate trajectory we’re on, the sooner we make this regulatory change the better.
Tracking rate cases like these is complex and challenging, but it’s worth the effort because so much is on the line. NRCM’s watchdog role extends to the PUC where these decisions are being made so we can protect Mainers by doing everything we can to control electricity prices, while advancing more sources of clean energy and a modern electric grid to power the future.
—Rebecca Schultz, NRCM Senior Advocate, Climate & Clean Energy
1 Maine Public Utilities Commission, November 18, 2025 deliberations, at https://boxcast.tv/channel/iyzf05zfuugzp7qqixvr?b=nmh6oz2bupijmkbs6f6p, 15:28.
2 Docket No. 2026-00011, CMP’s Response to Data Request OPA-001-001. Incremental distribution storm expenses for 2022, 2023, and 2024 were $129,301,561, $206,281,898, and $204,620,216 respectively.
3 Ibid. Incremental distribution storm expenses for the 57 storms that CMP claimed for 2025 were $43,764,911.
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