Body
ISO New England, the independent nonprofit that runs the regional wholesale electricity market, projects that electricity use across New England will rise by about 9% over the next decade, according to a report released May 1. The grid operator said the region’s demand outlook is still upward, but the new forecast is more conservative than in recent years. The shift comes as federal energy and climate policies have changed, while Maine’s state-level efficiency efforts continue, according to state program officials.
The grid operator said the underlying driver of growth is electrification—specifically the spread of technologies that use electricity for both heating and transportation. “The two big factors that are driving this growth are the electrification of heating and transportation,” Mary Cate Colapietro, a spokesperson for ISO New England, said in the report’s coverage. Colapietro said heat pumps and electric vehicles tend to be more efficient than oil or gas-powered heaters and combustion engine cars, and she pointed to electricity generation increasingly coming from sources such as solar and wind.
Colapietro also said the region had seen years of relatively flat demand. “We’ve had years of relatively flat demand, and that’s thanks to states in the region making real investments in energy efficiency measures. But looking ahead to the future, there is going to be a shift,” she said. The forecast aims to help utilities and policymakers plan grid infrastructure investments, even though ISO New England does not own generation or transmission assets itself.
The report’s demand models incorporate changes expected across homes and businesses, including electric vehicles, electric heating systems such as heat pumps, and power generated “behind the meter” from solar panels. This year’s forecast also included, for the first time, estimates of electricity demand from large users such as data centers and added behind-the-meter battery storage to the modeling. ISO New England said that so far, New England has not faced as much data-center demand as other parts of the country, though the latest report included one planned facility in Massachusetts.
Michael Stoddard, executive director of Efficiency Maine, said ISO New England’s forecast reflects a “Goldilocks amount” for grid planning. “Increases to the grid cost money,” he said. “You want to find this Goldilocks amount. You want to build it to the right size at the right time.” Stoddard said the operator has been too aggressive in past projections for how quickly electric vehicles and heat pumps would expand, and he described this year’s outlook for the number of those technologies as “more reasonable,” while also saying the electricity consumption estimates for heat pumps are still too high.
Colapietro said ISO New England updated its assumptions and adjusted modeling for how much electricity heat pumps consume this year, and also factored in reduced demand linked to building weatherization efforts. In an email, she wrote that the Capacity, Energy, Loads, and Transmission report “goes through a variety of additions, revisions and changes each year to reflect the ever-evolving changes of the bulk power system,” adding that “each year our forecasters examine a variety of factors” to build long-term projections.
Federal and state incentives are diverging, the report’s coverage said. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act funded tax credits to encourage heat pumps and electric vehicles, but the credits ended at the end of 2025 earlier than planned after the Trump administration took office and shifted federal policy away from electrification and renewable energy toward continued use of fossil fuels. Maine, however, has state-law goals requiring that at least 115,000 households be fully heated by heat pumps and an additional 130,000 partially heated by 2030, along with goals for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Stoddard said Maine’s rebate funding has been sustained for more than a dozen years, and he said the program’s continuity gives contractors confidence to hire and train crews to install heat pumps. He also said Efficiency Maine expects to keep that funding “into the future.” Maine’s governor’s office has reported that more than 200,000 heat pumps have already been installed across the state, while Efficiency Maine has issued about 2,000 rebates for electric vehicles over the past five years.
Maine’s utilities are planning for the impact of higher electricity demand, particularly in winter when heat pumps run more. Judy Long, a spokesperson for the utility company Versant, said the state’s grid has some capacity to absorb growth after the closure of many former mills, but planning for higher winter demand will require investments. Long said both Versant and Central Maine Power recently submitted integrated grid plans to the Public Utilities Commission, and she said those plans relied in part on ISO New England’s forecast from two years ago, with Versant building flexibility so that a more conservative forecast should not disrupt its planning.
Policy changes and grid upgrades can also affect what customers pay. Francesca Hsie, deputy director for electricity at the think tank Third Way, said electric bills do not necessarily have to rise steeply as demand grows and depends on the energy supply mix, what utilities invest in, and how much additional grid expansion is needed. “There has to be an emphasis, especially in the near term, on the lowest-cost solutions to upgrade the grid,” Hsie said, including building more solar and wind capacity and deploying smarter grid technologies such as advanced conductors.
Maine’s electricity planning process includes the integrated grid plan reviews before the Public Utilities Commission, and the state Department of Energy Resources is also beginning work on the next Maine Energy Plan, which is updated every two years.