Today, the Maine Public Service Commission deemed their distributed energy generation procurement non-competitive and decided to start the process over. Following is a joint statement from Jeremy Payne from Maine Renewable Energy Association and Erika Niedowski from Coalition for Community Solar Access:
While we are disappointed in the outcome of Block 1 of the distributed generation procurement, we fully support the efforts of the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to ensure a competitive, fair process that is as transparent as possible. We will work with the commission and all stakeholders to identify and overcome the challenges to the bidding process so we have an outcome that is in the best interest of Mainers and the state’s clean energy future. However, we do urge the commission to act quickly on behalf of the companies that participated in the procurement process and the thousands of Mainers who stand to immediately benefit from the bill savings, millions of dollars in local investment, and hundreds of new clean energy jobs that will be created when this program is finally up and running.