The playbook for politicians, policymakers and the press is clear when electricity prices rise: blame the boogeyman! AI! Big Tech! Data Centers! (Bonus points if you use those same data centers to complain about data centers!)
The snag in this case is none of those culprits exist in Maine1. The state has maybe half a dozen “data centers”, if we are generous and count former mainframe rooms and co-location facilities boasting megawatts you can tally on one hand and still have fingers to spare. My basement rack may have more capacity than some of Maine’s data centers.
If the pain in Maine wasn’t inflicted by Big Bad Tech, what caused electricity prices to surge? I will suggest the state (like many others) has taken its electricity for granted while pursuing an idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and innumerate energy strategy, aka “none-of-the-above”. And now the bill has come due.
Among Maine’s difficult-to-reconcile energy decisions:
- Restricting transmission – In 2021, Maine voters opted to (retroactively2) kill the 1.2GW New England Clean Energy Connect which would have brought Quebec hydropower to Maine and the broader New England grid. Voters apparently disliked power lines crossing wilderness and/or sharing anything with the abominable Bostonians. The initiative also raised the regulatory hurdles for any future transmission lines.
- Forsaking Appalachian natural gas – Even though natural gas is Maine’s largest source of electricity generation, the state has joined the rest of New England in limiting natural gas pipelines from Appalachia –3 which is just a few hundred miles away and one of the great shale basins in the world. Instead, New England imports Canadian and liquefied natural gas, leaving itself at the whim of global markets (LNG is more expensive and more volatile in price than piped gas). New England has taken the same approach with heating oil (Maine is number one in the country for heating homes with it), which led to the shocking realization they were doubly exposed to Russian hydrocarbons after the invasion of Ukraine.
- Decommissioning nuclear – The 860MW Maine Yankee plant was shut down in 1997 and subsequently dismantled. As people are now realizing (everywhere except Germany), nuclear is clean, zero-carbon, and consistently available, and shutting down existing plants is an egregious mistake.
- Burning trees – 14% of Maine’s electrical generation comes from biomass, a fancy euphemism for wood. While trees are renewable, burning them for electricity is ridiculous and at odds with any clean energy goals. Wood-fired generation emits carbon, creates air pollution, and is less efficient and more expensive than natural gas.
- Subsidizing demand (while restricting supply) – Maine subsidizes the purchase of electric vehicles and heat pumps through state-financed rebates. Subsidizing demand while restricting supply is classic policy dysfunction and virtually guaranteed to drive prices higher.
- Banning lithium mining – Despite its enthusiasm for electric vehicles, Maine has the world’s richest known lithium deposit yet prevents the mining of this critical battery component.
FAFO as energy policy! It also looks uncomfortably similar to Europe’s energy strategy.
Remember Maine!
Data centers are an easy, faceless boogeyman, but the perilous state of our energy system is multi-causal: the result of decades of neglect, magical thinking, and contradictory goals. Even if you canceled every proposed data center, it wouldn’t solve our fundamental energy challenges, as the case of Maine illustrates.
Advanced civilizations don’t exist without abundant energy, and today that means the electrification of everything. We can and should have it all: data centers, electric cars, heat pumps, clean energy, and so much more.
Politicians and policymakers failing to provide abundant and affordable energy need to take responsibility, acknowledge the bad decisions that got us here, and start building new generation, transmission and distribution. This will be far more productive than ranting about data centers.
I’m a long way from Maine – what am I missing there? (beyond lobster.)
- As far as I know, local politicians are not scapegoating data centers for Maine’s electricity price increases, but I don’t really follow Maine politics. ↩︎
- After a lengthy legal battle, NECEC recently got its permits back after a Federal Court ruled they couldn’t be taken away retroactively. It is unclear if public sentiment has become more favorable to electrical infrastructure after experiencing hefty price increases. ↩︎
- That is a human-generated em-dash. I tried to structure the sentence other ways, but the em-dash felt best. ↩︎
