This week, we were excited by the news that WSP, a Montreal-based leading global professional services firm, has entered into a $1.78B agreement to acquire a fellow E2Tech member, Power Engineers, a prominent U.S. consulting firm with a leading presence in the Power & Energy (P&E) sector. WSP is an E2Tech Sustaining leader, and both firms have been affilaited with E2Tech for many years.
WSP has offices in Portland and Eliot, and Power has offices in Augusta and Freeport. WSP has roots as an employee-owned firm before it became a publicly traded company in 2006, and it now employs more than 69,300 people globally in sectors spanning transportation, infrastructure, environment, building, energy, water, and mining. Headquartered in Idaho, POWER has been an employee-owned company since 1998.
If you have a story of how changes in fossil-fuel energy costs have influenced your business, please share it with us.For more than a decade E2Tech has collected weekly price data on fossil-fuel energy: the cost of #2 heating oil, propane, and kerosene (see below, with the price spikes during the Covid epidemic). The aggregated data is on the GEO website, and Maine’s data is compared nationwide with the numbers from other states on the US Energy Information Administration website.The Governor’s Energy Office recently put the contract out to bid, and E2Tech was awarded the work. Next Tuesday is the start of another two-year cycle of calls to oil and propane distributers statewide. It’s one of many ways E2Tech helps the people and business community.
Three state bond issues totaling $70M will be on the ballot in November, and each will have a positive impact on a different segment of the E2Tech community. There’s $35M to invest in the design, development, and maintenance of trails statewide, $25M for technology innovation, research and development, and $10M for historic community building restorations and reuse, such as old mills. Since 2007, voters in Maine have cast ballots on 42 bond issues, totaling $1.65 billion, and they approved 41 of them.
Housing concerns continue to befuddle business expansion plans. Acadia National Park, Friends of Acadia announced a $10 million fundraising campaign, aimed at addressing the shortage of housing for seasonal staff, and now Jackson Labs has approval for a $33M expansion for rare disease research, but locals are concerned about where those 95 new hires will live.
For years, the Maine Technology Institute has offered grants, loans, equity investments, and services to entities in our sector, and many E2Tech members businesses, organizations, and individual entrepreneurs have received support to help expand Maine’s innovation economy.
Learn more at mainetechnology.org.
Job Opening at E2Tech - Cleantech Program Manager
E2Tech is looking for a new early-career professional who cares about environment & energy issues to help us organize and manage our very diverse community. E2Tech is a great stepping stone for career advancement. Jacqui Baker is the fourth E2Tech employee or intern in the past 12 months to find a great position at one of our members; the others are Marty Grohman (now at Eaton Peabody), Rylee Ewald (now at GMRI), and Taylor Colbeth (now at City of Portland). The official posting will be on the website shortly. The target date for making a decision is Sept. 15, with a start on Oct. 1. Expressions of interest can be emailed to info@E2Tech.org.
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