If your business buys electricity from Central Maine Power, prices for all of 2022 are up a whopping 82%. (Compare same month prices in 2022 to 2021.) If you’re in Versant, it’s 77%. Ouch!
If you’re buying power from the utility, brace yourself. (For help, see below.) Bills arriving in February – April will be about TWICE as much as last year. After that, the increase is only 25-30% for the rest of 2022. Not good news.
How can this be? Much higher exports of natural gas are the root cause, as we explain in another post.
What can you do? Plenty. In Maine you actually have a lot of options to manage electricity prices. In fact, there are so many choices (Maine has 44 different energy programs ) that it gets confusing quickly. Regardless, the best way to control energy costs–and this is key–is to move away from grid-based fossil-fueled electricity. A great place to start is with Sustaine’s free Energy Scorecard. From a single bill, Sustaine’s software ranks all the options for a given facility, revealing which option provides the greatest savings with the least effort. This includes renewable options as well as efficiency and competitive purchasing.
Indeed, if you’re already purchasing electricity competitively, you may be sheltered from the worst for 2022. Regardless, look now at multi-year competitive pricing. And if you’re supplied by CMP or Versant, let’s look right now: The worst prices are in the first quarter of 2022. Now is the perfect time to act.
Here’s more good news: Most solutions are available with no money down. Near-term solutions like competitive purchasing and community solar won’t cost you anything. In fact, even long-term solutions like onsite solar and efficiency improvements include financing. You’ll realize net savings from the very first month. So what are you waiting for?
If you’re ready to take control of your energy costs, and push back on CMP and Versant with their 80% price increases, it’s easy with Sustaine. Let’s get started.