Maine commercial electricity: CMP and Versant

Eleven delivery utilities, two of which take suppliers

The Office of Public Advocate publishes the list that decides the question, and it is longer than most buyers expect. Delivery in Maine is an exclusive-territory monopoly, so exactly one company delivers to any given address: Central Maine Power, Versant Power, or one of nine consumer-owned systems. The consumer-owned group is not a footnote. It includes Eastern Maine Electric Cooperative in Calais, Fox Islands Electric Cooperative on Vinalhaven, Houlton Water Company, Isle au Haut Electric, Kennebunk Light and Power District, Madison Electric Works, Matinicus Plantation Electric, Monhegan Plantation Power District and Van Buren Light and Power. Several of them exist because the address is an island or a border town that the grid reached late and cheaply, and they buy their own power rather than hosting a retail market.

• 35-A M.R.S. §3202(1) gives all consumers the right to buy generation from a competitive electricity provider from 1 March 2000, subject to one exception.
• The exception in §3202(7) is the consumer-owned route: the Commission may authorise a consumer-owned delivery utility to aggregate its own load and buy generation for its customers.
• A business in a consumer-owned territory therefore has no supplier to choose, no matter how large its load, and the first question in any Maine procurement is who delivers.

The default supply is bought in classes, not in bulk

Standard-offer service is the Maine default, and §3212 requires the Commission to make it available to all consumers and to run a bid process for each delivery utility's territory. The design detail that matters commercially is in §3212(1)(D): the terms must retain averaged prices for all customers in the same class. That is why the published standard-offer pages are organised by class rather than by utility average. Each utility carries a residential-and-small-commercial class, a medium non-residential class and a large non-residential class, and Versant runs the exercise twice because it has two districts, the Bangor Hydro District and the Maine Public District, each with its own prices for the same class names.

• The large non-residential class is published as a two-part price: a capacity charge per kilowatt plus an energy charge per kilowatt-hour.
• The medium class is published as a single energy price that varies by month.
• The Commission describes the large-class prices as indexed to wholesale market prices and set in advance of each month, which is a different product from a fixed annual price.
• For most customers in the CMP and Versant areas the standard-offer price changes on 1 January, announced a month or more in advance.

What the utility hands your prospective supplier

§3212(2)(A) sets out what a delivery utility must give the bidders: general credit data and, from general load and usage data, monthly demand and energy consumption plus the number of customers in each class. Individual customer data is released only with that customer's permission. Read that from the buyer's side and it explains a familiar experience. A supplier that has never seen your interval data can still quote you, because it can price the class; what it cannot do is price your building. The difference between the class average and your load shape is where most of the variance in a Maine commercial quote lives, which is why the useful first move is a twelve-month usage export rather than a comparison of headline offers.

• Ask for twelve months of kWh and kW by month, not a single annual total.
• Ask whether the quote was built on the class profile or on your own interval data.
• A quote that cannot answer the second question is a class price with your name on it.

The five-day window and the renewal notice

Maine puts its consumer protection earlier in the transaction than most competitive states. The Commission's guidance is explicit that a competitive provider must give you its Terms of Service before enrolling you, and that you may opt out of any agreement within five calendar days from the provision of that document. The same guidance says providers must obtain your authorisation before enrolment, and must notify you of an automatic renewal or of a switch to a variable term at the end of a fixed term. Those obligations sit alongside the licensing duty in §3203, which requires a provider to hold a Commission licence before selling at retail and requires any third-party sales agent to be registered as part of that provider's licence, with a registration number issued by the Commission.

• Five calendar days runs from the Terms of Service, not from the first bill.
• The renewal notice duty is on the supplier, but the remedy is on you: nothing in the rule obliges the supplier to negotiate at renewal.
• Non-residential customers may face a fee for leaving standard-offer service in certain circumstances; residential customers do not.
• Early termination fees in provider contracts are permitted, so the exit cost belongs in the comparison.

Renewal in Maine runs on a January clock

Because the default resets on 1 January for most CMP and Versant customers, a Maine renewal is not really a date on your contract; it is a relationship to that reset. A twelve-month term signed in October expires just before the new default price is known, which is the worst of both worlds: you negotiate against an old benchmark and you renew into an announced one. The Office of Public Advocate warns buyers in plain terms that a customer who does not contact the supplier before the contract end date to sign a new contract or ask to return to standard offer may be automatically extended and moved to a higher or variable rate. The arithmetic to run before signing is simple and needs no prices: months of term remaining after the next 1 January, and whether the quoted structure is fixed for all of them.

• Work backwards from 1 January rather than forwards from the signature date.
• If the term crosses a reset, ask what the supplier's renewal notice will say and when it will arrive.
• A term that ends in the same week the new default is announced gives you no comparison to make.

Six lines on the bill, four of which you cannot shop

A Maine commercial bill separates supply from delivery, and the delivery side is a regulated pass-through of costs the Commission and, for transmission, FERC and ISO New England set. The Commission's own explanation of the bill names the components: the standard-offer or provider supply charge, transmission, distribution, stranded costs, and the Efficiency Maine Trust assessment. Stranded costs recover above-market obligations left from the pre-restructuring generation assets, and the Commission describes them as small and declining. The Efficiency Maine assessment funds the state's efficiency programmes, which is also where a commercial customer finds the incentive money for the projects that reduce the demand the rest of the bill is built on.

• Supply is the only line a competitive provider prices; the rest follows the address and the meter.
• Versant's terms require an average power factor of 85 per cent for each month, with corrective equipment at the customer's expense, so a poor power factor is a delivery-side cost you can influence.
• Efficiency Maine runs custom and prescriptive incentives for commercial equipment, which is the one place a Maine bill can be reduced by changing the building rather than the contract.

What the renewable standard does to a supply contract

Maine's portfolio standard is a supplier obligation, not a customer election, and its goals are set in statute: 80 per cent of retail sales from renewable resources by 1 January 2030, and 90 per cent renewable with a further 10 per cent from clean resources by 1 January 2040. §3210 separates Class I new resources, Class IA, Class II existing resources and thermal renewable energy credits, and §3203 requires a licence applicant to show evidence of the ability to satisfy the portfolio requirement. For a commercial buyer the practical consequence is that the renewable content is already inside whatever supply price you are quoted, so a separate green product is a second purchase rather than a substitute. The statute also gives transmission- and subtransmission-voltage customers a defined election over Class IA and thermal obligations, but the election window closed at the end of 2019 and the resulting position runs only to the end of 2027.

• Ask a supplier how its portfolio compliance is met, not whether the product is green.
• The goals are statewide consumption goals; the obligation that binds a supplier is the class-by-class portfolio requirement in §3210.
• A transmission-level account that made the §3210(10) election should check the 2027 end date against its contract term.

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