The Maine Climate Council is skipping green hydrogen, for now, and turning to electric vehicles

The Maine Climate Council has concluded that green hydrogen is unlikely to be a commercially viable market until 2030, so putting 15,000 more Mainers in electric vehicles by the end of the decade, for a total of 150,000, it is the state’s best hope to meet its emissions reduction goals. .

The change came Thursday as the council put the finishing touches on Maine Won’t Wait 2.0, the state’s second climate action plan, which will be presented to Gov. Janet Mills on Nov. 21. The plan outlines ways Maine can reduce emissions and adapt to climate change.

State law requires Maine to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 45 percent by 2030, or from 31.4 million tons to 17.3 million tons. From 2021, latest data available, Maine had gotten a 30% discount..

The council consultant had originally estimated that Maine could meet its 2030 goal with 135,000 electric passenger vehicles and hydrogen-derived fuel to meet 1.3 percent of Maine’s energy demand, along with a tried-and-true combination of heat pumps, building air conditioning and low vehicle mileage.

But the consultant has had to rebalance that emissions formula after the council balked last week at the prospect of pinning even 1% of its hopes of meeting its 2030 emissions target on an emerging hydrogen power market, unknown to some members.

“Modeling shouldn’t be aspirational,” said board co-chair Hannah Pingree. “It has to be realistic.”

Green hydrogen is a clean-burning fuel produced by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity; when combined with oxygen in a fuel cell, it can produce heat and electricity and emit only water vapor. In April, Maine lawmakers approved a 20-megawatt clean hydrogen pilot plant.

On Wednesday, the consultant, Jeremy Hargreaves of Evolved Energy Research, came back with a new formula: Maine would need 150,000 electric passenger vehicles on the road by 2030 to make up for the emissions savings lost by cutting Maine’s hydrogen power. the energy mix of the decade.

Besides, 15,000 EVs doesn’t sound like much, but the council has already had to scale back its EV targets once. In 2020, Maine’s first climate action plan projected 219,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2030. That’s clearly not happening: Maine now has just 12,000 electric passenger vehicles.

“When we set the goal in 2020, we saw a takeoff in electric vehicles,” Pingree said. “We thought the market would move faster. The pandemic has slowed that down. The trajectory is not where it needs to be to achieve the goal we set for ourselves in 2020.”

Council members hope the rate of adoption will accelerate now that Maine is expanding its high-speed charging infrastructure and supply chain disruptions related to the pandemic have eased. To promote the adoption of electric vehicles, the council wants 50% of the electric vehicle rebates to go to people on low or moderate incomes.

“This is still a big transition for the people of Maine,” said Pingree, director of the Governor’s Office of Policy, Innovation and the Future. “The plan (calls for) many more electric vehicles on the road than we have now in the next five to six years. I think all the strategies we put into the plan will help us achieve that.”

Some council members on Wednesday worried that the 150,000 light electric vehicle target was not ambitious enough. Kate Dempsey, state director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine, noted how far the 2030 goal has fallen from the 2020 goal. “This is a place to aim a little higher,” Dempsey said.

But Pingree said the revised goal puts Maine ahead of the federal government’s EV adoption schedule.

“It takes about 10 to 15 years to achieve a light vehicle fleet turnover,” Pingree said. “I would say when you look at the numbers in 2050 (100% EV adoption) and think about the fleet turnover rate, that’s still going to be a really significant change in our fleet over the next two decades.”

DON’T GIVE UP HYDROGEN

The hydrogen-EV switch doesn’t mean Maine is giving up on hydrogen. Commissioner Melanie Loyzim of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection said hydrogen will be an important clean energy option for hard-to-electrify sectors such as heavy vehicles, industry and aviation.

“As technology costs decrease and green hydrogen becomes more widespread, hydrogen is predicted to become a more reasonable alternative for hard-to-electrify applications,” Loyzim said. “Hydrogen will play an important role in providing clean fuels for these uses.”

Many of the goals included in Maine Won’t Wait 2.0 are continuations of those included in the state’s first plan, which was published in 2020, but others have been reworked to ensure benefits reach all Mainers, including:

• 40,000 heat pumps in low-income homes by 2030
• 10,000 low-income weather-affected homes by 2030
• 1,500 clean, energy-efficient, affordable homes created per year
• 15,000 rooftop solar or community solar sign-ups for low- and middle-income homes by 2030
• 40% of grants for climate resilience in disadvantaged communities.

The scientists who advise the board paint a warmer and wetter future for Maine: Average temperature will rise by 2-4 degrees by 2050 and up to 10 degrees by 2100, depending on global emission rates. Rainfall is generally increasing, with more intense showers, but droughts will also intensify.

Dry periods will become drier and wet periods will become wetter. The 2020 growing season was the driest on record; the summer of 2023 was the rainiest. Storms like those that caused more than $90 million in damage to public infrastructure and millions in private property loss last winter will become more intense.

The Gulf of Maine has risen about 7.5 inches in the past century, with about half of that occurring since the 1990s. The Maine Climate Council predicts seas will rise another 1.1 to 3.2 feet by 2050, and by 3 to 9.3 feet by 2100, depending on how much we reduce global emission rates.

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