Regulators revived a massive energy bet by handing the reworked Aroostook County wind transmission project to Central Maine Power Co.’s parent company, and it is already drawing fire from a corner of the Republican Party that helped write the law behind it.
The Maine Public Utilities Commission announced Tuesday that Avangrid will build a 1,200-megawatt transmission line connecting northern Maine to the regional grid, while another developer will build an 800-megawatt onshore wind farm to feed it. The original developer walked away from its 2023 bid amid a pricing dispute with regulators.
It is Maine’s third major transmission fight in five years, and the battle lines are scrambled. Many Republicans, including one of this project’s chief architects, are now raising alarms about cost. The renewable energy industry and environmental groups who feuded bitterly over CMP’s western Maine hydropower corridor are taking a supportive if cautious posture.
The project is years away in the best-case scenario for CMP. Maine’s share of the wind power will be about 600 megawatts, and the commission projects the combined projects will deliver $387 million to $425 million in net benefits to Maine ratepayers, create more than 2,500 construction jobs over four years and generate $2.4 billion in total economic output.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island are sharing the cost of the transmission line, leaving Maine responsible for less than 11% of it as opposed to the 60% under the last project’s design. The estimated price tag for that was roughly $1 billion. CMP also has nearly complete rights to the land, something the commission noted in its release.
Maine Senate Minority Leader Trey Stewart, R-Presque Isle, was a champion of the 2021 law that created the program putting a new transmission project in his district. But his enthusiasm has since cooled. Stewart last week said his backing hinged on early projections that the project would lower ratepayer costs.
“When those projections changed and it became clear the project would instead increase costs, the Public Utilities Commission should have reconsidered it and, at that point, it lost my support,” Stewart said.
Rep. Reagan Paul, R-Winterport, a member of the Legislature’s energy committee, blasted the selection on social media last week, arguing Maine’s renewable buildout has already cost ratepayers heavily and that the project layers billions more in transmission spending onto the grid for limited winter reliability benefit.
Her Facebook page lit up with populist anger in response, with commenters calling the move a “backdoor deal” and raising CMP’s foreign ownership. One commenter raised concerns about deer-wintering grounds along the route.
Not every Republican has staked out a position. Rep. Matt McIntyre, R-Lowell, another energy panel member, said he wants to talk to state and utility officials before drawing conclusions.
“It is a very complex and nonlinear discussion to navigate,” McIntyre said. “There’s the potential for a lot of impacts, and I also understand we are very early in that process.”
The skepticism amplifies a broad national shift. The share of Republicans who favor more wind power plummeted by more than 20 percentage points from 2020 to 2025, according to the Pew Research Center. Legislative Republicans are weary of outgoing Gov. Janet Mills’ renewable policies, including solar subsidies and offshore wind plans that have mostly stalled.
The renewable energy industry and business groups are rallying behind the Aroostook selection. The Maine Renewable Energy Association and a regional affiliate said the project would bring affordable, reliable power to Maine, and Maine State Chamber of Commerce CEO Patrick Woodcock praised the commission’s new process.
Five conservation groups, led by the Natural Resources Council of Maine, offered more conditional support, saying in a joint statement they will push for high environmental standards during permitting rather than endorse the specific projects outright.
That could signal a reversal from Maine’s last transmission fight. CMP’s $1 billion western Maine corridor was resoundingly defeated in a 2021 referendum. But that result was overturned by the courts, and the project began operating earlier this year.
The opposition campaign was fueled by more than $20 million from NextEra Energy, a rival power producer that owns a nuclear plant in New Hampshire and an oil-fired plant in Yarmouth, putting fossil-fuel interests on the same side as National Resources Council of Maine, a liberal group that fought the corridor on environmental grounds. NextEra is going through a controversial merger that is opposed by many state leaders including Mills, a Democrat.
It is not yet clear whether rivals will organize opposition here. Bill Harwood, a former Maine public advocate who backs the project, identified them as one potential source of strife as well as neighbors along the route who object to new transmission towers and people who distrust CMP. But he said CMP’s involvement could be good for the project in the end.
“They will have a harder time walking away from this, given their commitments and how much exposure they have to the political winds of the state,” he said.