Tux Turkel is a former staff writer at the Portland Press Herald covering energy issues.

At dawn on a December morning from where I live, I can see Maine’s failing energy policies drifting out into the frigid air.

Across Casco Bay, I see smoke rising from the 421-foot chimney at Wyman Station in Yarmouth. This power plant from a bygone era burns barge loads of polluting, climate-warming oil.

Maine’s continued dependence on oil was displayed that morning on the online dashboard at ISO New England, the region’s grid operator. At 7 a.m. with temperatures near zero, it showed natural gas plants generating roughly half the region’s total electricity.

Nuclear power was 19%. Coming in third were oil plants such as Wyman, at 15%. Renewable energy, led by wind farms, clocked in at 8%. Now 68 years old, Wyman has a total capacity of 822 megawatts. It’s the largest power plant in Maine. Wyman is only called into service now on the coldest or hottest days.

Some people say, shut it down. I ask them, when the temperature falls to zero, how many hours are you willing to be without electricity?

That’s why the plume rising from Wyman in 2025 is a symbol of a failing energy policy in Maine and, more broadly, New England. 

This fall I attended two large energy conferences, one sponsored by the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, the other by the Industrial Energy Consumer Group, which represents mills and other big electricity users. I came away more pessimistic about Maine’s energy future than any time in my many years of writing about the issue.

Maine has a state energy plan that builds on longstanding efforts to reduce our dependence on imported petroleum and shift to an economy powered largely by renewable electricity resources. It complements the state’s climate action plan, Maine Won’t Wait.

The problem is, both strategies depend on cleaner electricity being affordable, a concept called beneficial electrification. But electricity is becoming more expensive, with prices nearly doubling in Maine over the past decade. 

Natural gas is a big factor. It still generates half of New England’s electricity, despite years of renewable energy expansion. It’s increasingly exported overseas, so it’s tied now to global prices. Public opposition to expanding pipeline capacity leaves our region short of gas on the coldest days, requiring costly injections of liquified natural gas.

Gas volatility is largely why most Mainers will see a $12 to $16 monthly increase starting in January for their electricity supply rate, called the standard offer. Also in the mix are new costs to harden the electric grid against stronger storms and public policies meant to advance renewable energy, notably solar. Meanwhile, oil prices are largely stable, for the moment. That’s reducing the incentive for consumers to switch to electric heat pumps or battery electric vehicles. 

But perhaps the greatest source of my pessimism comes from witnessing the sabotage of offshore wind. No, not the next-generation floating turbines that the University of Maine and its partners have been working on for years. I’m talking about seabed-mounted offshore wind farms, a mature technology with thousands of turbines spinning worldwide.

In his quest to kill green energy, President Donald Trump has hobbled a multi-billion dollar industry that was starting to employ thousands of high-skilled workers and manufacture components across the United States.

It also was New England’s next big source of energy. There’s nothing of a similar scale ready to break our dependence on natural gas and oil. Yes, a recent court decision against Trump’s illegal orders to stop projects already permitted or under construction may seem like a victory. But the damage is already done.

I get a daily newsletter on the offshore wind industry. The sector is booming in Europe and Asia, but no new investment is coming to the United States. Global companies have learned a bitter lesson about investing in a country where contracts and permits mean nothing. 

Just this past week, Trump fired a kill shot at the five remaining projects on the East Coast, ordering them paused by citing made-up “national security” risks. It’s unclear how this will play out in the inevitable court challenges. If we’re lucky, the best we can do now is finish the handful of  projects already built or pending.

Vineyard Wind, which is nearing completion off Massachusetts, already saved consumers $2 million a day during the cold snap by displacing some natural gas, according to a recent article in the the Boston Globe. Another bright spot is the start up of the New England Clean Energy Connect power line. With a capacity of 1,200 megawatts, it will bring a critical, 24/7 slug of electricity into the region from Quebec. 

Environmental groups fought it for eight years, through a referendum and legal challenges. They even got $20 million worth of help from NextEra Energy, which owns Wyman Station and the Seabrook nuclear plant and didn’t want NECEC’s competition. The delay pushed up the eventual cost for electricity customers by a half billion dollars. 

Opponents questioned the source of NECEC’s power, which is mostly hydro, and cried out against a transmission corridor bisecting Maine wilderness, which is actually a working forest laced with logging roads. And they said it wasn’t needed, thanks in part to offshore wind.

No one could foresee how one man would upend an industry. But here we are. Now what? That’s what Maine energy experts discussed at the two autumn conferences. I was not comforted by what I heard.

A big-picture concept was sketched out by Richard Silkman, the retired head of Competitive Energy Services in Portland. Silkman has been promoting a plan for Maine to transition to a zero-carbon economy through beneficial electrification. He outlined his ideas for turning Vacationland into “Generationland,” essentially using our land and our solar and wind resources to export power south and make money from it.

I’m a big Rich Silkman fan, but he lost me when I saw the scale of the proposal, the thousands of wind turbines and vast acres of land and sunny rooftops needed. 

And then I saw how the vision butted up against current state policy, articulated in an address by Philip Bartlett, chair of the Public Utilities Commission. Bartlett explained how Maine is partnering with other New England states to develop big energy infrastructure. One example is the decades-long attempt to build a transmission line that would connect giant wind farms in Aroostook County to the New England grid. A regional partnership would reduce financial risk to electric customers, Bartlett said. 

Bartlett’s right about one thing. The growing cost of electricity will be the top energy issue of 2026. The PUC read the room right last month when it quickly rejected Central Maine Power’s $1.5 billion rate hike request. The money was earmarked for hiring more line workers and getting a jump on all the grid hardening needed to keep the lights on, as climate change drives storms that are stronger and more frequent.

But CMP wasn’t wrong either. Unless or until Maine somehow moves to an affordable electricity distribution system that’s decentralized and powered by solar, wind and batteries, we need to make the existing poles and wires more resilient. 

This dilemma isn’t unique to Maine. Rising electricity prices are animating political discussions everywhere, as the 2026 mid-term elections near. That makes me even more pessimistic. 

Positions in Maine’s crowded gubernatorial race are still forming. But Democrats will have to fight the urge to over-subsidize clean energy, despite the climate imperatives. And Republicans will have to come up with some real solutions.

Thanks to Trump, they’ve already won the offshore wind battle. They can stop pretending they care about whales. But their calls to expand natural gas pipelines won’t motivate policy makers and residents outside of Maine, and the small modular nuclear reactors getting a lot of hype aren’t coming here soon. They don’t exist yet and the costs of power are unknown.

You might think that one answer to making energy more affordable is to help people use it more efficiently. But Trump also is killing incentives that helped people weatherize their homes,
and buy more efficient appliances and vehicles. 

That leaves New England on its own.

Somehow, our region must figure out how to continue the transition to cleaner electricity, without making it so expensive that homes and businesses find it cheaper to stay with fossil fuels.
 
For now, though, I’ll keep an eye on Wyman Station on cold winter mornings, watching our energy policy go up in smoke.