In Maine, you can lose your home to your oil bill | Opinion

Matt Pouliot is a real estate broker and entrepreneur who served six terms in the Maine Legislature, including a leadership role on the Housing Committee. He is co-founder and CEO of ATLAS Building Composites. Martin Grohman is the former mayor of Biddeford and a former executive director of E2Tech.

You can lose your home to the bank. In Maine, you can also lose it to your oil bill.

That sounds like a stretch until you look at how people decide whether they can afford a home. It isn’t just the rent or mortgage. It’s rent plus heat plus electricity.

A family might be able to swing $1,800 a month for a place. Then January’s oil bill arrives. Maine depends on heating oil more than any other state, and our electric rates are among the highest in the country. Energy costs can mean the difference between keeping a home and losing it.

So when we talk about Maine needing roughly 84,000 more homes by 2030, we should be talking about energy costs in the same breath. It’s the same affordability crisis showing up on different bills.

The two of us come at this from different places. One is a Republican who spent a career in real estate and the Legislature. The other is an independent who has worked in manufacturing, served as mayor and led Maine’s clean-energy business group. We don’t agree on everything. But we agree on this.

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First, stop picking winners in energy.

Solar and batteries make sense where the numbers work. One of us has solar on his building and an electric car in the driveway. But we shouldn’t rule out pipelines, fuel infrastructure or transmission projects simply because they don’t fit a preferred energy strategy.

Restricting supply or limiting options often means Maine families and businesses pay the price, especially the retiree in a drafty farmhouse who can’t afford new heating equipment or the tenant whose landlord passes along rising energy costs.

What helps keep prices down is reliable supply and competition. Solar, hydro, wind, natural gas, renewable fuels, propane and energy storage all deserve consideration. Judge them on cost, reliability and environmental impact, not ideology. And start with efficiency. The cheapest energy is the energy you never have to buy.

Second, make it easier to build things.

That goes for apartments and it goes for power lines. A good project in Maine can spend years navigating reviews that overlap, stall or start over. Every month of delay adds carrying costs, and somebody pays them, usually the renter or the ratepayer. We need clear standards, firm timelines and decisions someone is accountable for. Protect the environment, absolutely. But an unpredictable process that takes years to reach a decision serves nobody well.

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We also need to build differently. Most homes still go up much the way they did 50 years ago: stick by stick, in the weather, with a shortage of skilled tradespeople. Prefabricated panels and newer methods like large-format 3D printing of structural components, which ATLAS Building Composites is developing here in Maine, offer ways to build faster, waste less and create tighter, more energy-efficient homes. They’re not a silver bullet, but they belong in the plan.

Third, Washington has a role.

Federal permitting requirements can add years to major projects. Sen. Susan Collins has a long record of backing Maine’s economy, and this year helped secure nearly $25 million for housing projects across the state, including workforce and senior housing in Springvale and student housing at York County Community College in Wells. That’s welcome progress.

We’d like to see that same leadership applied to permitting reform: clear standards, predictable timelines and strong environmental protections. Few things Congress could do would help Maine’s housing and energy challenges more.

No single fuel, technology or law will fix this. But if we want young people to stay and employers to grow, Mainers need homes they can afford to live in, not just move into. That means making it faster and easier to build and keeping all energy options on the table.

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