Maine’s electric vehicle landscape may soon look a lot more like California’s if the state’s environmental regulators decide to implement rules that would mandate an increasing number of vehicles to be “zero-emissions vehicles.” 

The state’s Board of Environmental Protection — a seven-member board appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state’s legislature — is set to decide on the proposed regulations on December 21. The mandate would kick in for model year 2027 and would require 82 percent of light-duty vehicles sold by model year 2032 to have zero emissions.

EVs have been making headlines recently as dealerships say consumer demand for them is staying low, despite thousands of dollars in tax incentives and rebates for buying one, as the Sun has reported. Concerns are growing that the mandates are requiring the switch to electric faster than infrastructure can keep up, as recent data from Consumer Reports indicate that EVs have 79 percent “more problems than gas vehicles” and publicly available functioning charging stations are few and far between.

Though Congress, backed by President Biden, allocated $7.5 billion in 2021 for the goal of building half a million EV chargers by 2030, not a single one had been installed from the program until the first charging station was activated in Ohio last week.

Though a handful of states have adopted the California-style rules, Maine’s geography and cold temperatures make it an “impractical state” to impose severe EV mandates, Maine Policy Institute’s director of legislative affairs, Jacob Posik, tells the Sun. 

“Maine is huge, the rest of New England fits in Maine, it’s so big. We’re very rural, and it’s very cold here,” he says, adding that Maine is “so spread out” that some commuters drive 50 miles each way to work every day. 

“So if you’re talking about the range of an electric vehicle in addition to the commute that you have, and how well that battery works in cold temperatures, it’s not the most practical state for far-reaching mandates,” Mr. Posik notes. 

Maine is part of New England’s regional electric grid, and many New England states are part of programs incentivizing renewable energy, he says.

“The reality is those are intermittent sources — there’s lots of wind turbines and lots of solar panels in the state of Maine — unfortunately they only create energy when the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining and when there’s not snow covering the solar panels,” Mr. Posik says. 

Though proponents of the regulations say some EV shortfalls can be figured out by the time the mandate kicks in, as the infrastructure stands now, the electric grid would not have the capacity to handle so many EVs, he says. 

If “even 50 percent of the population of Maine” was plugging in EVs at night to charge, “there’s frankly no way that the regional grid could handle that right now,” Mr. Posik says. 

For years, environmental groups, permitting delays, and eminent domain concerns have blocked power transmission line projects — including the New England Clean Energy Connect, which would link dams in Canada to the Northeast. 

“It’s really a mess in my opinion,” Mr. Posik says. By attempting to mandate EVs, he adds, Democrats are “undercounting” the effects these rules will have on the population. 

“If you talked to the average Mainer — regardless of their political leanings — who live in the second district of Maine, very rural, biggest congressional district east of the Mississippi, they would think that this thing is so out of touch that it’s mind-boggling to them,” he says. He says he suspects that even if the rules are implemented, the environmental regulators will have to reconsider them. 

“When that starts to kick in,” he says, “and somebody goes to buy a new vehicle and they’re told what they can and can’t buy, I don’t think Mainers will like it very much.”