GRIDsilience: Energy Storage Opportunities
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There is a moment in every infrastructure story when the abstract becomes physical. For Parker Hadlock, General Manager of Cianbro Development Corporation, that moment came at a Pumped Storage Hydropower (PSH) plant in Massachusetts. He was on a tour through the massive Bear Swamp facility when there was an outage somewhere on the grid. It was eye-opening to be present as the plant responded by going from zero generation to 600 megawatts in minutes.
Hadlock used that story to introduce a challenge with an opportunity that Maine and the region are only beginning to tackle. The region is working to be more energy secure by building more renewable generation. Electricity demand is growing across the country and the regional grid is moving from an era dominated by summer peak load to winter peak load. This could leave New England more insecure due to the natural gas constraints, coincidental with our heating load.
The system needs resources that can do more than simply produce electricity. It needs resources that can move electricity through time. That is the promise of energy storage. But there are questions on how we value, incentivize and pay for it.
The duck curve comes to the northeast
Hadlock's interest in storage grew out of Cianbro's experience building renewable energy infrastructure. The Maine-based contractor entered the wind business in 2008 with the Fox Islands Wind project in Vinalhaven, Maine. Soon, the industry found itself confronting an uncomfortable reality: building renewable generation is limited by the infrastructure around it.
“It became apparent to us that without more transmission and/or storage, the renewables industry in this part of the world would not grow,” Hadlock said.
Then there was California. The state's famous “duck curve” showed what happens when large amounts of solar generation flood the grid during the middle of the day and then disappear just as people begin coming home, turning on appliances and demanding more electricity. Hadlock looked at the curve and saw a preview of New England.
“This is coming to a theater near us,” he said. “How do we deal with this?”
The answer, increasingly, is storage. But storage does not fit neatly into the old categories of the electric industry. It is not quite generation. It is not quite transmission. It is not quite load. It is a little bit of all three. Ethan Tremblay, Deputy Commissioner at the Maine Department of Energy Resources (DOER), compared it to a Swiss Army knife. That may be the best description of the opportunity.
The Swiss Army knife
A battery can store electricity and release it later. It can also respond rapidly to changes on the grid. A PSH facility can do the same on a much larger and longer-lived scale. It can also provide services that are harder to see on a monthly electric bill and that electricity markets may not be appropriately pricing.
“PSH provides essential grid services not provided by inverter-based generation and are not compensated today,” Hadlock said. “We need these ancillary services to be valued in the market.”
Remarkably, PSH is capable of providing these services during both generating and pumping. These capabilities during the pumping cycle are especially valuable to the grid as pumping typically occurs when wind and solar are at their highest penetration and the grid is most vulnerable to small system variances. In E2Tech’s GRIDsilience panel with utilities, Versant’s Dave Norman discussed the blackout on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) on April 28, 2025 that was triggered at 12:33 PM when 80% of generation was from renewable sources.
While industry experts agree that storage is key to meeting resiliency and affordability goals, there is much discussion about what kind of storage is needed, how quickly the region needs it and how the market should compensate for it.
Building a bigger battery
Cianbro's answer is not an oversized lithium-ion battery. The company’s subsidiary, Western Maine Energy Storage (WMES), is developing an off-river 500MW / 5.6 hour PSH facility in western Maine. The concept is straightforward, even if the path to construction is not. When electricity is abundant and low-cost, pumps move water uphill into a reservoir. When electricity is needed, the water flows downhill through turbines and generates power that will reduce the region's reliance on New England’s highest cost and highest carbon generation.
WMES began by looking at 32 potential sites in Maine. It narrowed those to eight, then three and eventually one. The criteria were practical: elevation difference, proximity to transmission, initial reservoir fill water supply, land control and nearby renewable generation. And then there was the factor that cannot be reduced to an engineering spreadsheet: local acceptance.
“WMES has conducted more than 70 stakeholder meetings over the past year and a half,” Hadlock said.
The proposed project sits in a region familiar with industrial infrastructure, near Rumford and the Androscoggin Mill in Jay, that were originally sited based on the tradition of hydropower.
“The reception,” Hadlock said, “has been what we hoped for. Local stakeholders genuinely understand the project and its benefits to the region.”
That matters because an energy project can be technologically brilliant and still go nowhere if it cannot find a community willing to host it.
The long view meets the short-term market
There can be a market mismatch when it comes to PSH. Typical financing models do not appreciate the value provided by infrastructure that is built to last for generations.
“We think this project has incredible long-term value,” said Hadlock. “Economics in the development business make long-term value very difficult. This is a high capital project, but the facility will likely operate for 100+ years. So, our challenge as a developer is selling that attribute.”
NextEra Energy Resources’ Michelle Gardner expanded on developers’ need for predictable commercial arrangements if they are going to make major investments. NextEra has roughly 5 gigawatts of battery storage across the country, Gardner said, including a 16-megawatt battery at Wyman Station in Yarmouth, Maine. Her message to policymakers and decisionmakers was straightforward: give developers a clear set of rules, predictable permitting and long-term contracts. NextEra generally prefers 15- to 20-year agreements that provide sufficient certainty to finance a project, she said. Rules that change in the middle of development add risk. Uncertainty is expensive.
Is Maine leading enough?
Maine has established statutory goals of 400 megawatts of energy storage by 2030. DOER is responsible for conducting competitive solicitations for clean-energy resources and supporting infrastructure. In 2026, storage became the agency's first major solicitation. DOER released a draft energy storage RFP in March and received comments from developers, utilities, communities and others. Tremblay said the final RFP will be reviewed by the Public Utilities Commission, with the goal of issuing in the third quarter.
The state is deliberately asking for energy storage, rather than simply asking for batteries. That leaves room for different technologies to compete. It also reflects the basic reality that Maine's grid has different problems occurring on different timescales. Some problems happen in seconds. Others happen over hours. Others involve winter peaks, transmission constraints or long-term changes in electricity demand. The right storage technology for one problem may not be right for another.
When asked by moderator Adam Cote of Drummond Woodsum if the procurement is enough, Tremblay described the procurement as the right step for the moment. It would help establish an industry, give communities experience with storage and allow Maine to learn how these resources perform in the market.
“I would say it's not enough,” Hadlock said.
For WMES and other developers, the issue is timing. Projects take years to develop and build. Current development projects should not be designed just around today's grid and challenges. They should be designed around the grid and challenges that Maine and New England are likely to have over the next several decades.
“We call it the Wayne Gretzky project. We’re skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been,” Hadlock said.
Gardner pointed out that even projects that can technically be built quickly do not necessarily get built quickly. An energy storage developer still needs a site, permits, contracts, an interconnection agreement, a reliable supply chain, etc. Start from scratch today, she said, and getting a utility-scale storage project online by 2030 can be a challenge.
Meeting the moment
There are questions that we in New England need to answer: How do we value a flexibility asset like storage that can absorb power when the system has too much and release it when the system has too little? How do we value time when we want equipment that can respond in seconds, yet requires keeping resources available for a problem that may occur only a few hours a year? Do we want to build infrastructure that will still be operating when today's policymakers and developers are long gone?
We may not know precisely how quickly electricity demand will grow, how many heat pumps and EV chargers will be installed, when new loads will arrive or where new generation will be built. We must identify investments that make sense across a wide range of futures. The solutions to meet our affordability and resiliency goals are now becoming less about technology and more about getting our institutions and systems to evolve as quickly as the technology itself.
Special thanks to event sponsors The Roux Institute at Northeastern University, Central Maine Power, Cianbro, and Drummond Woodsum. E2Tech programs are supported by our members and sustaining partners like the Maine Technology Institute which offers grants, loans, equity investments, and services to foster Maine’s innovation economy.
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