04/22/2026
In 2012, Acadia Center – then known as ENE, or Environment Northeast – filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The claim was deceptively simple: the rates these utilities were charging to transmit electricity across their lines were too high.
Unjustly, unreasonably high.
For more than a decade, the case, docket EL13-33, Environment Northeast (now Acadia Center) v. Bangor Hydro-Electric Company, dragged on. The case was consolidated with ones filed by the Massachusetts Attorney General and others. Years passed, administrations changed, and the case traveled circuitous routes through appeals and review.
Fourteen years later, FERC issued a decision, and Acadia Center won. The Commission’s ruling accepted the core argument that had been sitting in that 2012 filing: the transmission rates were not just and reasonable.
The decision will force a recalibration of how utilities recover costs and earn returns on equity in the Northeast. It will lower barriers for renewable energy to connect to the grid. It will save ratepayers money.
This ruling will rewrite the rules for millions of people and, by some estimates, more than $1 billion is expected to be returned to ratepayers from years of overpaying.
The lesson from Acadia Center’s fourteen-year campaign is not that justice is swift.
It’s that justice is stubborn. Progress doesn’t always arrive in a blaze of glory.
Sometimes it arrives in a decision dated years after you filed. Slow progress doesn’t mean no progress. In the end, the New England consumers didn’t win because Acadia Center was bigger, better funded, or more influential.
New Englanders won because Acadia Center was right, and because we refused to believe that a fourteen-year wait wasn’t still worth the fight.
Happy Earth Day to everyone in New England and beyond – from Acadia Center.
