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

The swap-out took place Thursday as the council put the final touches on Maine Won’t Wait 2.0, the state’s second climate action plan, which will be submitted to Gov. Janet Mills on Nov. 21. The plan outlines ways for Maine to reduce emissions and adapt to its changing climate.

State law requires Maine to reduce its 1990-level heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, or from 31.4 million metric tons to 17.3 million metric tons. As of 2021, the last data available, Maine had achieved a 30% reduction.

The council consultant had initially projected Maine could hit its 2030 goal with 135,000 electric passenger vehicles and hydrogen-derived fuel to meet 1.3% of Maine’s energy demand, along with a tried-and-true mix of heat pumps, building weatherization, and reduced vehicle miles traveled.

But the consultant had to rebalance that emissions formula after the council balked last week at the prospect of pinning even 1% of its hope of hitting its 2030 emissions target on an emerging hydrogen energy market unfamiliar to some members.

“The modeling shouldn’t be aspirational,” said council co-chair Hannah Pingree. “It needs 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 facility.

On Wednesday, the consultant, Jeremy Hargreaves from Evolved Energy Research, returned 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 hydrogen power out of Maine’s end-of-decade energy mix.

An extra 15,000 EVs may not sound like much, but the council has already had to scale back its electric vehicle targets once. In 2020, Maine’s first climate action plan projected 219,000 EVs on the road by 2030. It’s clear that isn’t happening: Maine has only 12,000 passenger EVs now.

A Toyota Rav4 plugin hybrid charges at a ChargePoint charger in front of City Hall in Portland in March. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer, file

“When we set the goal in 2020, we saw a takeoff in EVs,” Pingree said. “We thought the market would move more quickly. The pandemic slowed that down. The trajectory is not where it needs to be to hit the goal we set in 2020.”

Council members hope the adoption rate will speed up now that Maine is expanding its high-speed charging infrastructure and pandemic-related supply chain disruptions have eased. To promote EV adoption, the council wants 50% of EV rebates to go to low- to middle-income Mainers.

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

Some council members worried on Wednesday that the 150,000 light-duty EV target wasn’t ambitious enough. Kate Dempsey, the state director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine, noted how far the 2030 target had sunk from the 2020 goal. “This is a place to aspire a bit higher,” Dempsey said.

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

“It takes about 10 to 15 years to do a light-duty fleet turnover,” Pingree said. “I’d say when you look at the 2050 numbers (100% EV adoption) and you think about the rate of fleet turnover this is still going to be a really significant change in our fleet over the next couple of decades.”

NOT GIVING UP ON HYDROGEN

The hydrogen-EV swap 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, like heavy-duty vehicles, industry and aviation.

“As technology costs decline and green hydrogen becomes more prevalent, hydrogen is predicted to become a more reasonable alternative for the hard-to-electrify applications,” Loyzim said. “Hydrogen is going to play an important role in providing clean fuels for those 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 guarantee that benefits reach all Mainers, including:

• 40,000 heat pumps in low-income homes by 2030
• 10,000 low-income homes weatherized by 2030
• 1,500 clean, energy-efficient affordable housing units created a year
• 15,000 rooftop solar or community solar enrollment for low- or middle-income homes by 2030
• 40% of climate resilience grants in disadvantaged communities.

The scientists who advise the council paint a warmer, wetter future for Maine: the average temperature will rise 2-4 degrees by 2050 and up to 10 degrees by 2100, depending on global emissions rates. Rain is increasing overall, with more intense downpours, but droughts will also intensify.

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

The Gulf of Maine has risen about 7.5 inches over the last century, with about half of that happening since the 1990s. The Maine Climate Council projects seas will rise another 1.1 to 3.2 feet by 2050 and 3 to 9.3 feet by 2100, depending on how much we curb global emissions rates.