HOULTON, Maine — Officials at the Houlton Water Co. said Friday they are “very pleased” with a decision by state regulators allowing the company to build a direct electric transmission line to connect to New Brunswick Power.
John Clark, general manager of the municipally owned utility, said Friday that the move will save “millions of dollars” for its customers over the coming years as it switches over to getting all of its electricity from New Brunswick by sometime in 2019.
Currently Houlton Water buys its power from Emera Maine.
“This is a decision that we are thrilled with,” Clark said Friday. “It has been a long time in coming. We first filed this in May and have been preparing for it a year before this, so it has been a lot of preparation, but the end result is that it will be a great deal of savings for our ratepayers in the long term.”
The Maine Public Utilities Commission approved the deal for financing and other permits on Nov. 22. A written decision was made public on Dec. 8.
Houlton Water Co. provides electric, water and sewer services to more than 5,000 customers in Houlton and portions of surrounding towns.
The project will involve building a 69 kilovolt transmission line from Woodstock, New Brunswick, to the border at Houlton. A substation will be built at the border on the New Brunswick side and a short 34.5-kilovolt distribution line will then be installed to connect it to the Houlton Water Co. system.
Both Clark and Greg Sherman, Houlton Water Co. assistant general manager, said that the majority of the total 9.3 miles of line and the substation will be built in Canada by contractors hired in New Brunswick.
The cost to customers for the construction project will be approximately $5.4 million over a 10- to 15-year period, according to Clark.
The two don’t anticipate that Houlton Water Co. will hire any new employees to build the roughly 1½-mile-long line in Maine.
Clark said the decision to build the new line was necessary, as the company is presently connected to the northern Maine transmission grid owned by Emera Maine. He said Emera’s rates have steadily increased, and in the next five years, Emera plans to seek customer and PUC support for investing in approximately $60 million to $70 million in transmission rebuilds and improvements on the northern Maine grid.
“We will avoid this by this project,” Clark said. “This will stabilize the rate for our customers, because if we don’t, we anticipate significant increases in the future, which is not something we want to pass on to our customers. Next year, our team will be meeting with Canadian officials to secure the permits we need to take the next step in our process. We then anticipate starting design work. I don’t anticipate any construction work starting until 2018, and the project should be online that year or sometime in 2019. We will disconnect from Emera and then connect to the New Brunswick transmission system, becoming a network transmission customer of New Brunswick Power.”
In their filing before the PUC, Emera Maine opposed the Houlton Water Co. project, arguing that the agreement with New Brunswick Power should be rejected “because it does not conform with the public interest because the total costs outweigh the benefits.”
Emera officials also argued that Houlton Water officials overstated the benefits of the proposal to ratepayers in Houlton and claimed it conflicted with public interest because it will result in fewer Maine jobs and lower reliability for Houlton Water customers “without clear reliability benefits in the rest of northern Maine,” according to case documents.
Sherman said that the large majority of the construction work will be done on land already owned by Maine or Canadian companies. Clark said that older utility poles will be replaced with newer poles.
“After we pay off the debt for this new construction, the rates will drop even more,” Clark said Friday. “This is a win-win situation for us.”
