The Maine Climate Council is wrestling with how Maine can meet its ambitious long-term emission reduction goals despite slow electric vehicle adoption rates and the high cost of making climate programs accessible to its most vulnerable residents.

The council, which has until Dec. 1 to send an updated plan to Gov. Janet Mills, spent four hours Wednesday trying to reach a consensus on how best to lessen and prepare for the impacts of Maine’s changing climate, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting emissions.

In 1990, Maine produced 31.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents. By state law, Maine must reduce that by 45% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. As of 2021, the last data available, Maine had achieved a 30% reduction from its 1990 emissions.

The easiest way for Maine to do this is to ensure that 53% of new passenger cars and 17.5% of new heavy-duty vehicles sold in Maine are electric by 2030, according to a state-hired consultant. That works out to about 135,000 passenger EVs and 3,000 heavy-duty EVs on Maine roads.

The updated climate plan is projecting 100% conversion to electric vehicles by 2050.

Maine has struggled to meet its EV targets. In 2020, when Maine was writing the state’s first-ever climate action plan, policymakers projected that Maine would have 219,000 light-duty electric vehicles on the road by 2030. As of last year, there were only about 12,500.

The Board of Environmental Protection rejected a mandate to boost electric and hybrid car sales last year after critics claimed Maine lacked the charging infrastructure to support it, prompting state lawmakers to assume jurisdiction over Maine’s tailpipe emission regulations.

Failure to achieve the already lowered EV targets in the proposed climate plan update would force Maine to ask more from other sectors to make up the difference, even though there are only so many areas that produce enough emissions to offset tailpipe emissions volumes.

“As some of the numbers go down, some of the other numbers have to go up to get us to that endpoint,” said Commissioner Melanie Loyzim of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. Loyzim is also co-chair of the Maine Climate Council.

For example, if Maine’s EV adoption rate is only 15% and 2.5% for passenger and heavy-duty vehicles by 2030, Maine would probably have to ask the industrial sector to meet 41% of its energy needs through renewable sources like wind or solar, up from the proposed 37%.

Even more troubling to council members was the consultant’s suggestion that Maine follow the lead of other states and make up any EV shortfall through emissions savings created by a new local hydrogen-derived fuel market that could meet 3.2% of the state’s energy needs by 2030.

“I’ll be the one to ask the stupid question: hydrogen, we’re just going to slide that in there?” asked member Jessie Perkins, the former director of Bethel Chamber of Commerce, prompting nodding heads around the table from other members. “What is it? Where do you get it? What is it for?”

At a recent briefing, the council consultant summed it up like this: 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.

Some renewable energy advocates envision a future “hydrogen economy,” where hydrogen is produced from multiple energy sources, including sunlight, stored for later use, piped to where it is needed, and then converted cleanly into heat and electricity.

Maine joined other New England states last year to apply for a $1.25 billion federal grant to fund a regional clean hydrogen hub of a dozen clean hydrogen projects to decarbonize high-emissions sectors, such as transportation and industrial. The application was rejected.

But the state is marching ahead anyway. In April, Maine lawmakers adopted a law directing the Maine Public Utilities Commission, the DEP, and the Governor’s Energy Office to select a proposal for a 20-megawatt clean hydrogen production pilot facility.

“When they ran the numbers for us, hydrogen pops up because of all of those federal tax credits,” Lozyim said. “Their model sees that as a real opportunity. We need to probably think carefully about whether or not that’s really feasible, particularly by the 2030 timeframe for Maine.”

As for the plan’s cost, nobody knows what it will be, nor has the council even tried to figure that out. The council didn’t have a plan on how it would fund its 2020 plan, either, but used it as a spending blueprint when federal funding began rolling in during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much of that funding is set to expire in 2030. Daniel Kleban, a local beer company owner representing small business interests on the council, said he worries about how Maine will fund this plan and reach its emissions goals once the federal money runs out.

“Call me skeptical, but I don’t know that Washington, D.C., is going to come in with the same type of funding that it did throughout the pandemic,” Kleban said. “It’s inevitable– we’re going to have to start coming up with our own ways to fund these projects if we’re going to meet these goals.”

Maine ended fiscal 2024 with $93.5 million in surplus revenue, a total that is much lower than the previous two years and part of a downward trend that has the Mills administration urging caution in upcoming state budget discussions.

But last winter’s climate-driven storms suggest that doing nothing – allowing the rising seas to wash away more of Maine’s working waterfront each year and rising temperatures to wreak havoc on Maine’s forests and farms – would probably cost Maine even more, said council co-chair Hannah Pingree.