As Maine considers building a new toll highway to improve commutes in and out of Portland, a state climate working group is drafting strategies to reduce driving in the state.

State officials say the two efforts are not inherently at odds, but experts and advocates caution that continued highway expansion could reverse climate progress by encouraging more people to drive.

The parallel discussions in Maine raise a question that few states have yet grappled with: can governments keep expanding car infrastructure without putting climate goals out of reach?

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Maine and many other states. Electric vehicle adoption is growing, but not fast enough to solve the problem on its own, which is why an updated state climate plan is expected to include a new emphasis on public transit, walking, biking, and other alternatives to passenger vehicles.

Zak Accuardi, the director for mobility choices at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the best way for states to invest in their road systems in the era of climate change is to not build new roads, but maintain and upgrade existing ones to accommodate more climate-friendly uses. 

“The states who are taking transportation decarbonization really seriously are really focused on reducing driving, reducing traffic,” Accuardi said, pointing to Minnesota and Colorado as examples. “Strategies that help support more people in making the choice to walk, bike or take transit — those policies are a really important complement to … accelerating the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles.” 

Slow progress on EV goals

Electric vehicles have been Maine’s primary focus to date in planning to cut back on transportation emissions. Goals in the state’s original 2020 climate plan included getting 41,000 light-duty EVs on the road in Maine by next year and 219,000 by 2030. The state is far behind on these targets. The climate council’s latest status report said there were just over 12,300 EVs or plug-in hybrid vehicles in Maine as of 2023. 

A 2021 state clean transportation roadmap for these goals recommended, among other things, the adoption of California’s Advanced Clean Cars II and Advanced Clean Trucks rules, which would require an increasing proportion of EV sales in the coming years. 

Maine regulators decided not to adopt Clean Cars II earlier this year in a 4-2 vote. A subsequent lawsuit from youth climate activists argued the state is reneging on its responsibility to meet its statutory climate goals by choosing not to adopt such rules. 

The original climate plan also aimed to cut Maine’s vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which measures how much people are driving overall, by 20% by 2030. The plan said getting there would require more transit funding, denser development to improve transit access, and broadband growth to enable remote work, but included little detail on these issues. It did not include the words “active transportation” at all. 

That appears poised to change in the state’s next four-year climate plan, due out in December. Recommendations from the state climate council’s transportation working group have drawn praise from advocacy groups like the Bicycle Coalition of Maine. 

New detail on non-car strategies

The group’s ideas include creating new state programs to support electric bike adoption, including in disadvantaged communities; paving 15 to 20 miles of shoulders on rural roads per year to improve safe access for cyclists and pedestrians; and, depending on federal funds, building at least 10 miles of off-road trails in priority areas by 2030. 

The group also recommended the state “develop targets related to increased use of transit, active transportation, and shared commuting that are consistent with Maine’s statutory emissions reduction goals.” 

In unveiling the recommendations, working group co-chair and Maine Department of Transportation chief engineer Joyce Taylor noted community benefits from road safety upgrades to accommodate these goals. 

“I think this also gets at housing and land use,” she said. “If you can get people to want to live in that community, that village, I think we could all say that it’s more economically vibrant when people are able to walk and bike in their village and feel like they can get around and it’s safe.” 

The Gorham Connector project would offer a new, tolled bypass around local roads as an alternative to upgrading those existing routes, an option that’s also been studied. State officials say the new road would smooth the flow of local traffic, including public transit. 

Towns aim to marry transit, housing, climate

Towns like Kittery, in southern Maine, have tried to focus on a more inclusive array of transportation strategies in their local work to cut emissions from passenger vehicles. 

Kittery town manager Kendra Amaral is a member of the climate council’s transportation group. She couldn’t comment on the state’s approach to the Gorham Connector, which is outside her region. But she said her town’s climate action plan, adopted this past May, “threads together” public transit, housing growth and emissions reductions. 

Stakeholders who worked on the plan, she said, strongly recommended ensuring that housing is in walkable or transit-accessible places. 

Amaral said the town has invested in new bus routes, commuter shuttles and road improvements to promote traffic calming and create safer bike and pedestrian access, as well as in EV growth. And she said Kittery was a model for parts of a new state law that enables denser housing development. 

“We can’t expect people to reduce (emissions) resulting from transportation without giving them options,” she said. But, she added, “there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution” for every community. “I believe we have to avoid the ‘all or nothing’ trap and work towards (the priorities) that get the best results for each community,” she said. 

‘Devil is in the details’

The Maine Turnpike Authority acknowledges the proposed Gorham Connector project in the Portland area would increase driving. But paired with improvements to transit and land-use patterns, they say the proposed limited-access toll road would decrease emissions overall — though research and other cases cast doubt on this possibility. 

“It’s possible for a project like this to be designed in a way that does produce favorable environmental outcomes,” Accuardi said, but “the devil is really in the details.” 

For example, he said the new road’s tolls should be responsive to traffic patterns in order to effectively reduce demand. If they’re too low, he said, the road will become jammed with the kind of gridlock it aimed to avert. But set the tolls too high, and the road won’t get used enough. 

He said it’s true that this kind of new access road can lead to denser housing development in the surrounding area — but the road will need to be tolled carefully to account for that increased demand. 

And the proceeds from those tolls, he said, should ideally go toward new clean transportation alternatives — such as funding additional transit service or safe walking and biking infrastructure around the new toll road, helping to finance subsidized affordable housing in transit-served areas, or allocating revenues to surrounding towns that make “supportive land-use changes” to lean into transit and decrease driving. 

Maine has indicated that it expects to use tolls from the Gorham Connector primarily, or at least in part, to pay for the road itself and avoid passing costs to other taxpayers.

But Accuardi said alternative strategies should see more investment than road expansions in the coming years if states like Maine want to aggressively cut emissions. 

He said on average, across the country, states spend a quarter of their federal transportation funding on “expanding roads or adding new highway capacity.” 

“That’s more money than states tend to spend on public transit infrastructure, and that really needs to be flipped,” he said. “We need to see states really …  ramping down their investments in new highway capacity. Because, again, we know it doesn’t work.”

Can Maine meet its climate targets and keep expanding highways? is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Climate and clean transportation advocates are calling into question a claim by Maine officials that a new toll road proposed outside Portland will reduce carbon emissions by alleviating gridlock. 

It’s a common argument made in favor of highway expansions nationwide, said Benito Pérez, the policy director of the nonprofit Transportation for America. But it relies on a narrow view of data that, in context, tends to show these projects are more likely to increase planet-warming emissions, he said. 

“They’re looking at it from one dimension,” said Pérez, a former transportation planner and engineer. “This is a multi-dimensional issue when it comes to emissions reduction, and it’s not going to work.”  

Maine’s proposed Gorham Connector project has met stiff public opposition in its rollout over recent months. The toll road aims to offer a more direct route from Portland’s growing suburbs into the city, bypassing local roads that officials say weren’t designed to accommodate increasing commuter traffic.

The project has been contemplated since the late 1980s. Its latest iteration builds on a 2012 study that recommended three main ways to improve connectivity between Portland and points west: new approaches to land use and development, expanded bus and passenger rail access, and various road upgrades and expansions, including the new four-lane, roughly five-mile bypass the state is now proposing.  

The Maine Turnpike Authority took more than three hours of comments at its first public input session on the project in March. On July 18, the MTA said it would delay further public meetings on the project and extend its permitting timeline due to a “high level of public interest and concern.” 

In response to questions for this story, MTA spokesperson Erin Courtney emphasized the importance of a multi-pronged approach in achieving the Gorham Connector’s projected climate benefits. 

“Coupled with targeted land use and transit initiatives, we aim to create a more efficient and sustainable transportation system that addresses both congestion and environmental impacts,” she said.

Benefits are ‘negligible at best’

The emissions impact of smoother traffic on the proposed toll road has been one of the MTA’s core arguments in favor of the project. The agency says on the the website for the Connector that it “will ease traffic flow, decreasing the number of idling vehicles, conserving fuel, and reducing exhaust pollutants in alignment with Maine’s Climate Action Plan.” 

But even in isolation, this emissions benefit is typically “negligible at best,” said Pérez. Despite ongoing improvements in vehicles’ fuel efficiencies and even electrification, he said, studies show that more use of expanded roads tends to outweigh this benefit. 

Pérez pointed to examples in the Washington, D.C. area, Salt Lake City and elsewhere where highway expansions that aimed to reduce gridlock instead led to more traffic and further need for expansions years later — a paradox known as “induced demand.” 

A 2015 paper from the University of California-Davis explains this phenomenon: “Adding capacity decreases travel time, in effect lowering the ‘price’ of driving; and when prices go down, the quantity of driving goes up,” author Susan Handy wrote. New roads, for instance, can encourage more low-density development, which in turn fills those roads with additional drivers. This counteracts the value of highway expansions in alleviating congestion, Handy said, and at least partly offsets the emissions reductions that come along with it. 

Courtney, with the MTA, said “the Gorham Connector’s design and goals suggest a different outcome,” arguing that the project is unique as a limited-access highway without many intersections or entrances. 

“By enhancing traffic efficiency and reducing congestion on local roads, it can offer a balanced approach that considers both transportation needs and environmental impacts,” she said. 

Portland resident Myles Smith, a steering committee member with Mainers for Smart Transportation, a volunteer group opposing the Gorham Connector, isn’t convinced. 

“It’s part of a pattern of showing only the rosiest possible scenarios of how, theoretically, on paper, with a lot of other assumptions going perfectly, it might reduce climate emissions,” he said. “It assumes a lot of other things that they have no control over at the Turnpike Authority, like land-use planning and public transportation.”

New measures of climate impacts 

The 2012 study backing the bypass proposal found that implementing a bevy of suggested road improvements and expansions, including the Connector, would decrease local vehicle hours traveled, or VHT — an analog for congestion, measuring how much time people spend in their cars, Pérez said — by about 10% versus 2035 projections. 

It also said the area’s vehicle miles traveled, or VMT — which measures how much people are driving overall — would increase relative to 2035 projections if the bypass was built, but would decrease in scenarios where only existing roads were improved, or where public transit was the focus. 

“This is why we propose a ‘three-legged stool’ approach,” Courtney said — one that also emphasizes dense development and increased public transit access, so that VMT increases might be offset by other benefits. 

VMT is an increasingly common way to measure the climate benefits of transportation projects, Pérez said. Minnesota and Colorado have adopted new requirements toward goals for reducing their overall VMT, mandating that proposed road expansions either contribute to this decrease, or fund climate mitigation projects otherwise. 

But advocates said VMT and VHT alone are not enough to measure the overall climate impacts of a project like the Gorham Connector. A more comprehensive analysis, they said, would include the environmental impacts of construction and would account in more detail for the role of the non-road improvements that the MTA is also calling for. 

A need for coordinated solutions

The 2012 study, in its final recommendations, said all three strategies — changes to roads, transit and development patterns — would need to “work together to provide the desired results” for improving connectivity and reducing traffic impacts in the Portland area. For example, more dense development and less congestion will make new transit approaches more viable, Courtney said. 

The Turnpike Authority has little direct control over those kinds of reforms, but says on its website that it expects “other regional studies” in those areas to be part of the Gorham Connector planning process. 

“The Gorham Connector project, combined with additional initiatives being considered by the MTA and Maine (Department of Transportation) — such as additional park-and-ride facilities, electric vehicle charging stations, and enhanced transit opportunities — will collectively contribute to reduced greenhouse gas emissions compared to a ‘do nothing’ scenario,” Courtney said. 

Smith said these other efforts are moving more slowly and with less state support than the Connector has received, putting these parallel solutions out of step with each other. 

Maine is facing a lawsuit from youth climate activists over regulators’ decision earlier this year not to adopt California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which would have ramped up requirements for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle sales through model year 2032. 

The state is still a long way off from the EV goals set in its 2020 climate action plan, which also aims to reduce light-duty vehicle miles traveled 10% by next year and 20% by 2030. 

Advocates applauded a new emphasis on transit, biking, walking and other alternative strategies to achieve those VMT goals in the recommendations from a state climate council working group for a forthcoming update of the climate plan, due out in December. 

It’s an example of slow progress toward more holistic approaches to transportation and climate planning, which, Pérez said, must extend to technical details like the traffic models that underlie projects like the Gorham Connector in order to succeed. 

“Those models need to think about what they’re measuring — what matters most,” he said. “The mindset is, ‘we’re designing for vehicles,’ and that’s what they’re measuring for, not measuring for the movement of people.”

Critics, studies cast doubt on Maine’s claims of climate benefits from highway expansion is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This story was co-published by Energy News Network, the Maine Monitor, and Grist.

Ron Huber rifled through a thick folder full of decades of state environmental records outside a community hall in the tiny coastal Maine town of Searsport. For the longtime local conservation activist, the scene inside was a familiar one: dozens of neighbors, workers and environmentalists mingled over pizza and coffee, discussing the merits of a proposed industrial project that has potential to transform the local economy, but at the expense of a locally beloved natural area.

“We’ve seen these things rise and fall many times,” Huber said outside the event late this past spring. Conservationists have celebrated over the decades as plans for a coal plant and a liquefied natural gas terminal on Sears Island came and went without success. 

This latest proposal presents a new kind of conflict. Rather than pitting townspeople against a corporate polluter, this development would support clean energy and be integral to the state’s plan for cutting climate emissions.

In May, the state applied for a $456 million federal grant to build a specially designed port on about 100 acres of Sears Island to support Maine’s nascent floating offshore wind industry. About two-thirds of the 941 acre island is in permanent conservation, and the state retains an easement on the rest, which has been reserved for a potential port for years. 

“We’re not optimistic that this one’s going to die under its own weight,” Huber said, noting that the offshore wind port has far more popular support than previous development proposals. 

Visits to recent community events like this one show that, unlike the polarized fights over clean energy projects in other parts of the country, Maine’s wind port is creating more personal divides — challenging residents’ values around climate change, conservation and economic factors. It previews what could be coming as wind grows in the Northeast. 

Conflicting values

“My question is really about why we’re not actually all on the same team,” said Belfast, Maine, resident Julianne Dow inside the community hall, during a question-and-answer period with New England labor organizers. “I’m very pro-union, I’m pro-offshore wind and pro having it here, and for the economic benefits for the region. But I’m also very pro maintaining Sears Island as a precious Midcoast resource.” 

Dow and activists like Huber want the port built instead at a Sprague Energy-owned oil and logistics terminal across the water known as Mack Point. It was considered as an alternative in lengthy public processes in recent years, and Sprague and opponents of the Sears Island proposal have continued to urge reconsideration for it so far this summer. 

Offshore wind has taken some big steps forward in Maine this year. Federal regulators approved a state research array of floating turbines, which generate power in deep waters far offshore, and are nearing leasing for commercial projects. A new state law calls for Maine to procure three gigawatts of offshore wind by 2040, using union-standard labor to build the projects and a floating wind-focused port.

Formal environmental assessments and site analyses are still pending. But state port authority director Matthew Burns wrote in June that Mack Point’s “physical and logistical constraints, need for significant dredging, and increased costs to taxpayers for land leasing and port construction would result in an expensive and inferior port for Maine compared to a versatile, purpose-built port on Sears Island.”

Still, opponents worry that wetlands and forests on Sears Island could be disrupted by port construction, even if most of the surrounding ecosystem remains intact. 

“Because we have to sacrifice something, let’s sacrifice something irreplaceable, instead of cleaning up a dirty old existing port?” Huber said outside the event. “That’s just ridiculous.” 

Asked if he saw wind as a climate solution more broadly, Huber began to express doubts about how turbine arrays would affect the ocean ecosystem. Fellow opponent Lou MacGregor of Belfast cut in. 

“Right now, what we’re focusing on is protecting Sears Island,” MacGregor said. “We can get to whether we support offshore wind or not after we protect Sears Island.” 

‘Skills that pay the bills’

Scott Cuddy, who until recently was policy director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, emphasized at the recent event that his group is agnostic about the port’s location, focusing instead on the benefits it could bring. Under Maine’s wind procurement law, he said, the port’s labor standards will be the same wherever it ends up. 

“We desperately want to see this happen, because we need to fight climate change, and we need to do it with good jobs,” Cuddy said. 

Cuddy and other labor organizers said state studies indicate that the port project and new wind farms could bring thousands of jobs to coastal Maine towns like Searsport. Local leaders said it could be a boost for shrinking school populations, attracting families to stay in the town long-term. 

“I think there’s been a mindset for a long time among kids, especially in rural Maine, like this was the thing I always heard — ‘You got to leave the state if you want to get a good job,'” said Sam Boss, the director of apprenticeships, workforce and equity for the Maine AFL-CIO. “We’ve got to find ways to keep our people here. And if there’s good opportunities, people will stay for them.”

Boss, Cuddy and others answered locals’ questions about plans for training programs for young people to enter the trades, and the family-sustaining wages and benefits promised by the growing wind industry — both in short-term construction positions and into the future.

“These are the skills that pay the bills, and they’re skills that don’t go away. The work might change — you know, we went from nuclear power plants, to now we’re doing offshore wind power development. But the skills are transferable,” said Nicki Kent, a union electrician who came to talk about her experience working on offshore wind in Rhode Island. “We’ve just got to get screwdrivers and wrenches into kids’ hands.”

Belfast resident Daniel Cowan was taking diligent notes on the back of an envelope while his teenage sons listened from the audience. A Navy veteran now pursuing a degree through the GI Bill, Cowan said he was curious about the possibility of wind industry jobs that could help him and his kids stay in Maine. 

Cowan empathized with attendees who were opposed to building the port on Sears Island, but said he thought the project’s benefits sounded like they would outweigh the costs.

“You’re going to destroy something no matter what you do. I love Sears Island, I think it’s great, I love walking my dogs out there. But I don’t think that’s going to change,” he said. “The world is coming to an end one way or another, and how fast we get there makes a difference.” 

Support from anti-wind groups

The island itself is connected to the mainland by a long causeway, bisected at its start by rail lines that snake around the coastline toward nearby Mack Point. The causeway juts out into Penobscot Bay, and Sears Island opens up at its end, an oval of land covered in trees and flanked by sandy, seaweedy shores. 

On a Saturday morning not long before the Searsport labor dinner, a large group of birders gathered at the gate where the causeway’s pavement continues into the forest. They had come to scout for the tiny, colorful songbirds that rest on the island each year amid long migrations between Canada and the tropics. 

Near the edge of the woods, someone had spray-painted the asphalt road with “Wassumkeag,” the indigenous Wabanaki name for the island. Hand-lettered signs with the web address for the advocacy group Alliance for Sears Island read, “Wind power = Good? On Sears Island = Bad!” 

The state does not plan to site wind turbines on Sears Island itself. Workers at the proposed port would help build and assemble towers and blades in pieces, towing them far out to sea for final assembly. 

Still, anti-wind groups have seized on the proposed project. Lobstermen affiliated with the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), a Maine-based advocacy group founded in 2023 that focuses partly on opposing offshore wind, spoke out against the port at the recent jobs event. 

“My concern is only that in trying to affect climate change, that we’re going to cause more damage to the environment than climate change is already causing,” said NEFSA officer Dustin Delano, a commercial fisherman from Friendship, Maine. 

NEFSA has since posted signs where the island causeway intersects with the heavily trafficked Route 1 that read “Keep Sears Island wild.” Similar signs showing a crossed-out wind turbine bore the name of Rhode Island-based Green Oceans. Since its founding in 2022, it has focused mostly on opposing Revolution Wind, currently under construction in waters between Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

Many who joined the recent birding trip seemed unaware that Maine’s plans for Sears Island did not involve actually erecting turbines there or close to shore. Others expressed doubts about wind generally. Some did not want to discuss the issue at all, focusing instead on peering through binoculars at the Northern parula, black-throated green warbler or hermit thrush chirping in the trees along the road. 

A few people mentioned concerns that wind projects could harm whales. Scientists have found no evidence to support this claim, which has been linked to fossil fuel-funded disinformation campaigns. Green Oceans’ campaigns in Rhode Island have mimicked the delay and disinformation strategies of climate denialist groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, according to Brown University research. 

Climate impacts close to home

The threat of climate change to ecosystems like Sears Island’s, meanwhile, is very real. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest-warming water bodies in the world, swelling sea levels, threatening the lobster fishery and leading to more frequent, destructive storms. Maine saw a state-record four federal disaster declarations in 2023 and has received two more already this year. 

The warming trend may affect the migratory birds that draw crowds to Sears Island each year. Warming temperatures are reshaping the length and timing of Maine’s seasons, which, combined with declines in insect populations driven by agriculture and other factors, could threaten the birds’ success, studies show. 

“If you look at decades and decades of patterns, you’ll see that birds are arriving one to two weeks earlier,” said William Broussard, a Midcoast Audubon board member who led the recent Sears Island trip. “If they get here early, they might not have the insects that they depend on to be out, because maybe the trees aren’t leafing out… and that can be really tough.” 

Midcoast Audubon hasn’t taken a position on the wind port issue. It’s a chapter of Maine Audubon, which separately supports the project but is not advocating for one site over the other. Maine Audubon is likewise independent from the National Audubon Society, which advocates for “responsibly sited renewable energy,” including wind, as a climate solution.

‘A terrible dilemma’

Marge Stickler, a birder from Belfast, said she wished the port would be built at Mack Point instead. “I have mixed feelings about what they’re doing here,” she said. “I love coming here… it’s a special place.” 

She had read an opinion piece earlier this year by activist Bill McKibben, founder of the climate groups 350 and Third Act, that urged Mainers to support the wind port even on Sears Island. McKibben wrote for Mother Jones last year that solving climate change will require a new “yes in my backyard” mindset. 

“McKibben wrote that you have to look at the climate as a whole, and this may be a good thing to have here,” Stickler said. “I’m not sure — why did he write that for Maine, he lives in Vermont, but… he said it’s better to have it and it’s better to have it here, maybe.” 

Dave Andrews, a retired engineer from South Bristol, Maine, struck a different tone as he trailed after the other birders. He’d worked on Superfund cleanups and brownfield solar projects in his career, and said he’d often heard “not in my backyard” sentiments from neighbors who were worried about viewshed impacts or a change in a place’s character. 

“If it’s a Walmart shopping center, I guess you have a valid statement,” he said. “But when it comes to something like this, this is a different balance.” 

Andrews called the port’s siting a “terrible dilemma.” But he felt swayed by the urgency of climate change and the fact that the project would leave much of Sears Island intact. As permitting and siting progress in the coming months, he said he hoped others who love the island would be able to accept the sacrifice.

“I don’t think there is a choice,” he said.

This story has been updated to clarify Maine Audubon’s position on the project and to correct Scott Cuddy’s title.

Offshore wind port siting raises new conflicts for coastal Mainers, environmental activists is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Solar developers will pay a premium to build projects on prime farmland under new rules in the works in Maine. 

The state Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry is drafting the rules based on a 2023 law that authorized it to collect extra fees from developers whose projects impact at least 5 acres of “high-value agricultural soils,” which regulators will define in rulemaking underway this summer. 

The program could involve a range of new fees for different kinds of farmland and project impacts, with money being set aside for “farmland conservation and solar mitigation projects.” Proponents hope the rules will push renewable energy development toward areas with less conservation value. 

“We would much rather see balanced solar siting than full-out moratoriums on solar energy development,” said Shelley Megquier, the policy and research director for Maine Farmland Trust, which supported the legislation authorizing the new rules. 

Critics, though, say the rules unfairly single out solar based only on anecdotal evidence of the industry’s impact on farmland. A recent report by the American Farmland Trust projected that low-density housing and other types of urban sprawl threaten to swallow more than 53,000 acres, or 5% of all Maine farmland, by 2040. 

The law also authorized the development of a similar scheme for wind and transmission projects that affect certain kinds of fish and wildlife habitat. 

Limited data, local concerns

Some advocates say the new fees single out renewables without clear evidence that a use like solar puts prime farmland more at risk than any other kind of development.

“The narrative around this has really been: how can we protect high-value farmland from solar development?” said Lindsay Bourgoine, the policy director for ReVision Energy, a major New England solar developer. “ReVision has a really big concern about the lack of data around that narrative.” 

Maine’s climate plan includes a goal of moving to 100% renewable electricity by 2040, and also aims to put 30% of the state’s land into conservation easements, including for farming, by 2030.

The state has already built close to a gigawatt of solar, most of it in smaller-scale projects. The five-acre minimum covered by the new compensation fees can support about a megawatt of solar.

Bourgoine’s company estimates that even if all of Maine’s existing solar projects under 5 megawatts had gone on prime agricultural lands, it would cover less than half a percent of all such land across the state. A recent report from the Center for Rural Affairs estimated a similar proportion for solar in Midwest states.

Groups that supported Maine’s new fee rules agreed that they hope legislators and state policymakers will turn their focus in the near future to both gathering more land-use data, and to considering expanding mitigation tools to uses that may be more common, such as housing, commercial development or roads. 

“If we’re talking about environmental impacts, we’re requiring mitigation of the one type of development that is benefiting the environment,” said conservation biologist and GIS manager Sarah Haggerty of Maine Audubon, which supported the bill to create the clean energy fee programs. 

Keeping farmers’ options open

Absent better data, Megquier said farmers and farm conservation groups like hers can only go on what they observe — which is “farmland being converted for solar production in pretty large amounts,” she said. 

“Some of that (is) what we would categorize as really high-value farmland, where unfortunately it’s being lost to agricultural production,” she said. “There may be farmers that would be interested in accessing that land to grow food for our communities.” 

Andy Smith and his partner run The Milkhouse dairy farm in Monmouth, Maine. They have their own small solar array and sit close to a power substation, and so have fielded extensive interest from solar developers who want to rent and build on some of their land. Some have offered more than $1,000 an acre for a 30-year lease, he said. 

Smith said he’s strongly supportive of an energy transition and sees frequent effects of increasing weather extremes on his farm. But he said solar is tough competition for farmers who lease or buy space from other landowners, often to grow hay to feed dairy cows like Smith’s. 

“If young people are trying to buy farmland, and they’re competing with solar developers, they’re not going to be able to buy farmland,” he said. 

For farmers that affirmatively want solar on their land, Megquier’s group hopes the new fee structure will incentivize projects to go on “marginal” land that’s less productive, unforested or disconnected from large active growing areas. 

“We hope that … this rulemaking takes those sorts of complexities into account,” she said. “We would want to see permitting for a solar development that supports current agricultural operation as sort of fast-tracked or, in some way, expedited.”

ReVision supports a similar outcome.

“We would just say that a landowner should have the default ability to be able to site solar on their property if the purpose of it is for revenue diversification to keep the farm in operation,” Bourgoine said.  

‘It gives us security’

Evelyn Norton is one such landowner. Her father raised dairy cows and harvested hay to feed them on her family’s farm in Livermore Falls, Maine. As that business declined and her dad got older, Norton said she realized, realistically, that she and her sister “were not going to be out on the tractors haying… and so we realized we needed to figure out what else we could do to bring income into the farm.” 

Numerous solar developers had contacted the family about putting an array on their land. Many were eyeing a particular flat, treeless area, close to grid infrastructure, with sandy soil. It had been the least productive plot for hay on the farm, Norton said.

“Someone referred to it as a Walt Disney solar farm property,” Norton said. “It was just like it was designed to be a solar array.” 

Her family worked with ReVision to build a community solar array on that 20 acres, covering about 15% of the farm’s total area. The grass beneath the panels is grazed by sheep, and the array provides power to five school districts — a nod to Evelyn’s mother, who was a long-time teacher.

Annual lease payments now provide the farm’s largest source of revenue, supplemented by various other agricultural uses, such as tree-growing and a farmer who rents space for his cattle. 

“We’re still wanting to stay as a one-unit farm and not have to sell off piece by piece. This allows us to do that,” Norton said. “It gives us the security to know that 135 acres is protected because of the 20 acres.”

Norton worries that the new fee structure, if not designed with the right exceptions, could prevent some farmers from using solar as she did to keep her farm viable. 

Pushing toward costlier approaches

Some advocates said they hope the rules will primarily help balance solar development costs so that farmland isn’t automatically the cheapest option. 

Smith, the dairy farmer in Monmouth, said he hopes at least the new fees will encourage development on “lower-quality soils.” But it’s easier said than done — these soils may be less well drained, for example, and contain areas classified as wetlands, leading to more regulatory complications. 

“It just often feels like, you know, a (good) solar site is going to be on well drained soil with southern exposure, which is also the best farmland there is,” he said. 

“We sincerely hope that this effort will not have a chilling effect… and, in some cases… could assist solar companies in terms of the predictability,” Megquier said. “The current structure is really not a structure. It’s very … project-to-project. And that is not to the benefit of advancing our conservation goals, nor is it to the benefit of advancing our renewable energy goals.” 

Under the new rules, regulators will have to define “dual-use agricultural and solar production,” such as agrivoltaics projects where crops and solar are co-located. Megquier hopes the new fees will incentivize this approach. 

For Smith, dual-use methods are the best hope for easing rural and neighbor backlash to solar energy, which he worries will slow its growth as a tool for fighting climate change. 

“It would really suck if the whole solar industry got like a black eye because of developing these open spaces,” he said. 

Haggerty, with Maine Audubon, said increasing costs for building on farmland could make more costly solar sites — including brownfields and developed spaces — more appealing for builders by comparison. 

“It may very well be that this legislation balances out some of those costs, you know — if you’re gonna have to mitigate… ag land or wildlife habitat, maybe it makes that brownfield more affordable, and it’s not as much cheaper to go elsewhere,” she said. “That’s one of the things that we hope to see.”

The state is currently gathering stakeholder input on a draft farmland rule expected out this summer. The Maine legislature will have to approve the eventual fee structures, which will apply to solar arrays that begin construction after Sept. 1, 2024.

As sprawl threatens farmland, proposed Maine rules single out just one competing land use: solar is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A climate trust fund proposed in Portland, Maine, would use money from the sale of city-owned renewable energy credits to kickstart further efforts to cut local carbon emissions. 

Portland is among the hundreds of U.S. cities that have adopted ambitious climate goals in recent years. Now, in search of sustained funding to meet those targets, many are turning to novel fiscal approaches, such as the one approved in Portland last week by the first of two city council committees.

The ordinance, if passed by the full council, would establish a new climate fund next year using money primarily from the sale of renewable energy credits, or RECs, from city-backed solar projects, such as at the Portland International Jetport and on the former city landfill. 

The money could help pay for consulting work on emissions-cutting or resiliency projects, climate grant-related costs or local matches, community micro-grant programs for climate-friendly improvements, or other expenses for the city sustainability office. 

“This is a new source of funding that can get invested in other city projects to, again, save more money,” said Bill Weber of Portland Climate Action Team, a local Sierra Club offshoot that’s been pushing for the city to make progress on its climate plan. The city, along with neighboring South Portland, adopted a shared target in 2020 of cutting emissions 80% over 2017 levels by 2050.

Proceeds from the sale of RECs would amount to about $300,000 to $400,000 a year, according to a memo from Portland sustainability director Troy Moon. It’s not enough to entirely fund major construction projects, Moon said, but “could provide leverage to launch such projects.” 

The fund would also include money from “penalties paid for violations of sustainability related ordinances, private donations, proceeds from grants, and voluntary appropriations made by the Council,” he wrote. 

‘Seed money for larger savings’

Weber describes the proposed fund as “seed money for larger savings.” He suggested a study of solar potential across city schools’ rooftops as one hypothetical use, with results that could be used to attract developers, choose priority projects and speed along their implementation. 

“A lot of these projects will pay for themselves over time, but you need to do some engineering,” he said. 

Peyton Siler Jones, the Portland-based interim director of sustainability with the National League of Cities, said creative approaches are essential to creating long-term funding streams for local climate work.

“Figuring out how to have those savings not just go to the general fund, but go to a special climate fund to continue to implement climate projects, is one example of an innovative solution,” she said. “It’s exciting to see that being something that can be scaled and replicated in smaller communities.” 

Siler Jones said Portland’s fund could be used to pay a consultant to write grants that could bring in federal funding. Or, she suggested as a hypothetical example, it could pay sustainability-related cost differentials on an affordable housing project — helping the developer by covering the extra cost of building materials to install heat pumps or funding a subcontractor to oversee climate-friendly engineering. 

While she wasn’t sure whether this idea is happening anywhere as of now, she said the general principle of dedicating city funding to climate efforts is becoming more popular. Boston now puts at least 10% of all new capital funding toward “open space, infrastructure, and facilities projects that are climate resilient or contribute to making the City more environmentally friendly,” according to the city’s website. 

Washington, D.C., has a long-running sustainable energy trust fund seeded with fees on electric, gas and fuel oil companies, as well as the sale of credits from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And in Ann Arbor, Michigan, millions in annual proceeds from a 20-year property tax increase adopted in 2022 go toward community climate projects. 

Selling energy credits to spur larger gains

The idea of using REC sales to seed the fund, as proposed in Portland, involves a complicated trade-off. 

The credits are an annual return for Portland’s investment in a given renewable energy project, essentially letting the city own proof of the progress on local emissions goals made by that investment. Selling those credits means selling that proof, and therefore that small piece of progress, in a given year. 

“We have to be really clear that if we’re making the sale, we’re not using renewable energy per se,” Moon told city councilors before a committee vote on the proposed fund last week. “But… there’s an opportunity to use those RECs to fund climate action that may otherwise not be able to happen, and that also provides other benefits, like resilience and cleaner air and improved infrastructure.” 

In comments to the council’s sustainability committee on the proposed fund, Weber argued that it’s imperative not to sell RECs to benefit anything other than continued, more substantial emissions cuts, meaning, he said, that the money should not be used for sustainability office salaries or resilience work. 

“From my perspective a ‘trust’ represents a sacred commitment that is made to future generations,” Weber wrote. “Spending the revenue from the RECs on anything that doesn’t generate a material return on that investment breaks the trust.” 

Before voting to advance the proposed fund last week, Portland city councilor Anna Bullett said she agreed that this funding should remain set aside for clear progress on city climate goals, not necessarily more general operations. 

“We’re already paying for everyone’s salaries as is,” she said. “Let’s try to protect that money that we already budget for every year and not backfill it with this instead.”

Portland, Maine climate trust fund would use solar credits to spur emission-cutting projects is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.