Heather Sanborn is Maine’s new Public Advocate. One of her priorities is to assist low-income electricity ratepayers. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

In her first week on the job, Maine’s new public advocate said she’s looking for funding to help low-income residents pay their electric bills and will urge caution as lawmakers grapple with a contentious solar subsidy program that’s become a focus of Republicans.

Heather Sanborn, who took over the Office of the Public Advocate this month, said she’s focused on an issue cited frequently by her predecessor, William Harwood, who retired Jan. 31.

“Our priority — as an office I’m carrying forward from Bill — is to urgently work on the low-income assistance program for ratepayers,” she said in an interview.

About 100,000 Maine households pay some of the most expensive electricity bills in the U.S., and costs are set to keep climbing in 2025, according to a state report in December.

Heather Sanborn is Maine’s new Public Advocate. Sanborn said she will speak neither for nor against legislation seeking to eliminate a solar subsidy program she supported when she was a lawmaker. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

Sanborn said the last of $15 million in the state’s two-year budget will run out at the end of the fiscal year on June 30, and no funding is set to take its place.

“We’re looking for all possible solutions to make sure low-income assistance is robust and we find additional sources,” she said.

Asked where she might find money, Sanborn said Tuesday “We’re working on it. It’s Day Two.”

The public advocate represents Maine’s utility ratepayers before state and federal regulators and leads an agency with 10 staff members and a budget of about $3.7 million.

On a separate matter — legislation seeking to end Maine’s net energy billing program that provides generators with credit for renewable power they produce and send to the electric grid — Sanborn said she’ll speak neither for nor against two proposals when addressing the Legislature’s Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee. Lawmakers have scheduled public hearings on Feb. 25.

Sanborn, a Democratic legislator who represented Portland for six years and voted in favor of net energy billing, said Maine needs to “take the issue seriously,” and would not support “deleting words from statutes” when net energy billing rules have been in force and are “part of the economy.”

“Deleting them is not good policy making,” she said.

Sen. Trey Stewart, R-Presque Isle, and the Senate’s Republican leader, said at a news conference this week that Mainers would save money using Canadian hydropower instead of solar power he said costs ratepayers unnecessarily by subsidizing solar developers in the net energy billing program.

“There are more so-called clean forms of power we could be accessing, particularly from our neighbors to the north that are also more economical, that would save ratepayers money instead of cost them more,” he said.

Republicans have repeatedly introduced bills to end net energy billing in recent years.

“There’s no reason for the program,” Stewart said. “If the goal is to incentivize solar we’ve certainly done that. We can move on.”