Maine becomes the 11th state to allow community choice aggregation, with automatic enrollment unless a customer opts out

How Maine community choice aggregation works

Governor Janet Mills signed L.D. 2112 into law on April 13, 2026, making it Public Law Chapter 665 and adding a new section, 35 A MRSA 3219, to the electricity code in Maine. Community choice aggregation lets a town or a group of towns pool the electric accounts of homes and small businesses and buy power for that whole group as one customer, instead of each account buying power alone from the investor owned utility serving the area. Maine is now the 11th state to write this system into law. A town cannot start one just by asking. Its town council or governing board must first approve a program by majority vote, then a majority of voters in that town must approve it too, and only then can the Public Utilities Commission, the state agency that regulates utility rates, approve the plan to launch.

These measures strategically address the high costs of electricity in Maine.

Gerry Runte, Representative and sponsor of the bill. Source 3.

Enrollment is automatic unless a customer opts out

Once a plan for a town is approved and customers are notified, the law enrolls the default electricity customers in that town automatically, unless a customer actively opts out. 4 groups of customers are the exception and must opt in instead of being defaulted in, customers already enrolled in net energy billing, a program that credits solar panel owners for extra electricity they send back to the grid, customers in a small local grid program called a front of the meter distributed energy resource program, customers already under contract with a competing electricity supplier, and customers already behind on bills in an arrearage management program. That last group also gets a separate protection, a customer on low income assistance can never be charged a program rate higher than the standard default rate. The law gives 4 named Wabanaki nations the same rights to organize a program that a town gets, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Mikmaq Nation, the Penobscot Nation and the Passamaquoddy Tribe. The Public Utilities Commission must begin writing the detailed rules that would let any of this actually launch no later than January 1, 2027, and no Maine town has adopted a program yet.

What the other 10 states show about how big this gets

Community choice aggregation is not new nationally, Maine is the 11th state, not the first. Massachusetts wrote the oldest version of this law in 1997, and New Hampshire enacted its own version in 2019. Each program eventually settles around a similar slice of its state population, from 40% in New Hampshire up to 45% in Ohio.

The number of towns that join varies more than the population share does. New Hampshire program covers 115 communities. Massachusetts covers 169. Ohio, whose law dates to between 1999 and 2007, now covers more than 350 active communities, the most of the 4 states with a stated count here.

Maine already runs small, older, community owned electric utilities in Houlton, Madison and Kennebunk, separate from and older than this new law.

In recent years, their supply costs have been about half the cost of default supply.

Seth Berry, Executive Director of Our Power Maine. Source 2.

What happens next in Maine

Nothing changes yet for an electricity customer in Maine. No town has adopted a program, and the Public Utilities Commission does not have to start writing the rules that would let one operate until January 1, 2027. Once those rules exist and voters in a town approve a plan, a default customer in that town would be enrolled automatically unless they opt out, the same design already running in the 4 states compared above.