Headlines reflect how U.S. states, school districts, and manufacturers are navigating new funding and emissions rules from the Trump presidential administration.
Mitzii Smith is the assistant director of transportation for Maine School Administrative District 6, a Maine School Safety Specialist, president-elect of the Maine Association for Pupil Transportation, and a 2024 STN Rising Star. She discusses running propane buses, promoting emotional intelligence to support staff, and what she’s looking forward to at STN EXPO Charlotte in March.
Gov. Janet Mills wants to make a new department focused on the state’s energy needs and goals.
In her upcoming biennial budget proposal that is expected on Friday, Mills will outline her plan for the current Governor’s Energy Office to be elevated to a cabinet-level department. This would be a budget-neutral initiative that would allow for more comprehensive and consistent management of Maine’s energy system, according to a news release from the governor’s office Wednesday.
If the budget proposal is approved by the Maine Legislature, the Governor’s Energy Office would transition to the Maine Department of Energy Resources by the end of this year. It would be led by a commissioner, who would be appointed by the governor and subject to legislative confirmation.
In recent years, the Maine Legislature has significantly expanded the responsibilities of the Governor’s Energy Office. For example, the office has secured more than $200 million in federal funding to support grid resilience and innovation, energy efficiency and workforce development.
“By designating a cabinet seat focused solely on energy issues, Maine will be in a stronger position to deliver more affordable energy, advance our energy goals, and grow the state’s economy,” said Dan Burgess, director of the Governor’s Energy Office.
The new energy department would be the lead agency on energy resources, policies, planning, data, markets, energy security and program implementation; all of which currently fall to the Governor’s Energy Office.
Like those in other states, Maine’s new department would have additional authority to conduct competitive energy procurements to meet the state’s power demands and reliability needs. It would also continue to coordinate with the Maine Public Utilities Commission and other state, regional and federal partners.
State law requires Maine to transition to renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions; however, it must be done while ensuring that Mainers will still have access to affordable, reliable and secure energy, said Maine Sen. Mark Lawrence (D-York) and state Rep. Melanie Sachs (D-Freeport), who serve as co-chairs of the Maine Legislature’s Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee, in a joint statement.
In 2022, Mills signed into law a state goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045. The next year, she set a new target of 100% clean electricity by 2040. She also established the Maine Climate Council, which is responsible for maintaining the state’s four-year roadmap to meeting those and other climate goals.
“Regular planning, evaluation, and education delivered by a dedicated agency will ensure the consistency needed to keep Maine on a path toward these goals,” Lawrence and Sachs said in the release. “There’s a reason why this concept has been proposed previously in bipartisan fashion.”
Maine also has a goal of creating three gigawatts of offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine — enough to power between 675,000 and 900,000 homes — installed by the end of 2040. While the state was awarded a lease for a research array with up to 12 floating turbines to help inform how floating offshore wind operates and interacts with ecosystems in the water, the future of the renewable energy source hangs in the balance with President-elect Donald Trump having said he would seek to halt all offshore wind projects.
In 2017, during the LePage administration, state Rep. Kenneth Fredette (R-Newport) introduced legislation to establish an energy seat in the cabinet that would be responsible for energy planning, data analysis and the implementation of an oil dependence reduction plan. The bill was supported by the Legislature’s energy committee at the time, but died upon adjournment.
The Maine State Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday it supports Mills’ proposal, noting that energy is one of the most pressing issues for the state’s economy.
“Addressing energy affordability and meeting our state’s climate targets will require careful planning and execution and the Chamber looks forward to working with the Administration on those efforts with a cabinet-level Energy Department leading that effort,” said President and CEO Patrick Woodcock in the release.
A Massachusetts university is developing technology that aims to use lasers to drastically cut emissions and energy use from Maine’s paper and pulp industry.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute recently received a $2.75 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to help ready the industrial drying technology for commercial use.
“We are all excited about this — this is potentially a groundbreaking technology,” said Jamal Yagoobi, founding director of the institute’s Center for Advanced Research in Drying.
In Maine, the paper and pulp business generates about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, roughly half of the state’s industrial emissions. Much of these emissions come from the process of drying mashed, pressed, and rolled wood pulp to yield paper products. The emissions come mainly from three major operations across the state; three additional facilities contribute smaller amounts.
These plants’ emissions will need to be addressed if Maine is to reach its goal of going carbon neutral by 2045. Furthermore, each of these plants is located in an area with an above-average population of low-income residents, according to data assembled by Industrious Labs, an environmental organization focused on the impact of industry. And two are located in areas with a higher-than-average risk of cancer from air toxins, suggesting a correlation between their operations and the incidence of cancer in the area.
At the same, the paper and pulp industry remains economically important to Maine, said Matt Cannon, state conservation and energy director for the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club.
“It’s got real union jobs — the paper industry is still very important to our community,” he said.
Worcester Polytechnic’s drying research center has been working on ways to dry paper, pulp, and other materials using the concentrated energy found in lasers. The lasers Yagoobi’s team is using are not the lasers of the public imagination, like a red beam zapping at alien enemies. Though the lasers are quite strong — they can melt metal, Yagoobi says — they are dispersed over a larger area, spreading out the energy to evenly and gently dry the target material.
Testing on food products has shown that the technology can work. Now, researchers need to learn more about how the laser energy affects different materials to make sure the product quality is not compromised during the drying process.
“For paper, it’s important to make sure the tensile strength is not degrading,” Yagoobi said. “For food products, you want to make sure the color and sensory qualities do not degrade.”
Therefore, before the system is ready for a commercial pilot, the team has to gather a lot more data about how much laser energy is incident on different parts of the surface and how deeply the energy penetrates different materials. Once gathered, this data will be used to determine what system sizes and operating conditions are best for different materials, and to design laser modules for each intended use.
Once these details are worked out, the laser technology can be installed in new commercial-scale drying equipment or existing systems. “This particular technology will be easy to retrofit,” Yagoobi said.
Industrial sources were responsible for about 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2023, about 28% of the country’s overall emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Heating processes, often powered by natural gas or other fossil fuels, are responsible for about half of those emissions, said Evan Gillespie, one of the co-founders of Industrious Labs. Many industrial drying processes require high temperatures that have traditionally been hard to reach without fossil fuels, giving the sector a reputation as hard to decarbonize, Gillespie said.
“The key challenge here is: How do you remove natural gas as a heating source inside industrial facilities?” said Richard Hart, industry director at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “The scale of what is happening in industry is enormous, and the potential for change is very powerful.”
To make the new technology effective, industry leaders and policymakers will need to commit to reinvesting in old facilities, Gillespie noted. And doing so will be well worth it by strengthening an economically important industry, keeping jobs in place, and creating important environmental benefits, he added.
“There’s often this old story of tensions between climate and jobs,” Gillespie said. “But what we’re trying to do is modernize these facilities and stabilize them so they’ll be around for decades to come.”
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