By John Henkelman
Like many across Sanford, I was surprised by my electric bill last month. Central Maine Power (CMP) customers as of January 2026 saw an average increase of $14 dollars to their monthly bill as the standard offer supply rate jumped from $0.11 to $0.13, rounded to the nearest penny. This two‑cent increase got me wondering: how much are we really paying for energy? And are we getting a fair deal?
To understand how electricity is measured and assigned a value, it is helpful to think of your home as a car on the highway. When you look at your utility statement, you are seeing a record of two different things: how fast you were moving and how far you traveled.
Power (Watts) Power represents how much “work” electricity is doing at any given moment. In technical terms, one watt (W) is one joule of energy transferred per second. However, for our purposes, it is easier to think of it as the speed of energy flow.
Just as your speedometer shows how fast your car is moving, watts measure how fast electricity is being used. For instance, a typical LED light bulb “drives” at a slow pace of only 9 watts, and your laptop moves a bit faster, using about 50 watts. A hair dryer on full heat is a racecar coming in at around 1,000 watts.
When you add up every appliance in your house, the numbers reach into the thousands. To keep the math simple, we use the term kilowatt (kW). Converting units is straightforward in the metric system, by simply moving the decimal point three places to the left.
Energy (Kilowatt-hours) Now that we can measure the speed of power, we need to measure energy. Energy is the total amount of power used over a period of time.
Using the car analogy, if your speed is 60 mph, that only tells us how fast you are going at one specific moment. If you maintain that speed for exactly one hour, you can calculate your distance: you have traveled 60 miles. Electricity works the same way. We measure this “distance” in kilowatt-hours (kWh). If you turn on a 1 kW heater and leave it running for one hour, you have consumed 1 kWh of energy. This is the “distance” your home “traveled”, and it is the primary number the utility companies use to determine your bill.
How Much Does a kWh Cost? Here in Sanford, we get our electricity from Central Maine Power (CMP). They are primarily regulated by the Maine Public Utilities Commission (MPUC) and the Federal Regulatory Commission (FERC), both of which are tasked with ensuring fair pricing for us, the consumers. Any rate hikes must be approved and are available online at maine.gov/mpuc/regulated-utilities/electricity/delivery-rates. As of January 1, 2026, CMP’s standard offer (the residential rate most of us pay) is 12.721¢, but that is only the cost of generating the energy. When the delivery charge (13.829¢) is added, the all-in rate is 26.550¢. This is lower than the average New England residential rate (31.20¢), but higher than the national average (18.07¢). This is all great information but can be misleading when we are trying to understand what we actually pay each month.
How do Sanford Electric Prices Stack Up? Sticking with the car analogy, the kWh cost is much like the price of gasoline. The driver of a Toyota Prius and the heavy-duty F-350 both pay the same price at the pump per gallon, but one pays more when they have a full tank (10.5 gallon tank on the Prius vs 35 gallons on the F350). The Prius has a much better efficiency rating so it can operate with a smaller gas tank to go the same distance. A 50 mpg Prius can go just about the same distance as a F350 (18 mpg) on a full tank but uses 24.5 gallons less fuel which means money saved.
Usage rates are a similar idea. To save money, you conserve what energy you are using through various measures. Taking this into account, we start to notice something unique to Maine and New England. The national average monthly usage sits just under 900 kWh, while New England and Maine come in at 601 kWh and 550 kWh respectively. Here in Maine, we use about 40% less energy than the country as a whole. This means that while our rates are higher, our monthly bills are actually lower (Figure 1). Unpacking Figure 1 we see the estimated monthly bill in 2026 as the bars and measured with the left axis and the overlying dashed line shows us the estimated monthly usage rate (kWh) for 2026 measured with the right axis.
But Why Is My Bank Account Empty Each Month? It is important to note that we cannot just look at electric prices to understand our total energy consumption and monthly bills. As we are all aware this year, Maine winters are long and cold, which partially explains our reduced annual electric consumption. Only during the warmer months do we consume electricity to cool our homes and for most of us we use some form of fossil fuels (natural gas, propane, heating oil, etc.) to heat our homes. The cost of our heating must be taken into account to see the bigger picture regarding our personal finances.
The first question is what type of fuel Mainers use to heat their homes. Half (50%) of Mainers use heating oil followed by propane (16%), wood/pellets (13.5%) and natural gas (8%). Electric heating sources such as baseboards or heat pumps make up 11% of current consumption.
Next by using consumption and projected prices from the Main Public Utilities Commission and U.S. Energy Information Administration one can get a better understanding of what the average monthly bill would be when normalized across November to March (Figure 2). Digging into these numbers, electric heating and natural gas are competitive in Sanford ($158 and $173 respectively), while propane ($377) and heating oil ($306) are significantly higher. This trend is also similar across the state and region, with electricity being higher across New England as noted earlier.
Putting it all Together By combining the percentage of Maine households using each fuel type with their respective monthly bills, a weighted average can be calculated. This weighted average provides a representative estimate of the average monthly heating bill across the entire state. While variations in fuel distribution make this method less precise at the national level, it remains a reliable tool for comparing energy costs across different regions.
Putting everything together (Figure 3) we can compare monthly electric bills (black bar) next to the weighted heating bill (grey bar) with the total energy bill (dashed line) over it. The total energy bill is calculated by combining the electric and heating bills. It should be noted that the electric bill is across 12 months while the heating bill only applies for the winter months, but it provides a good comparison across the regions if what we are paying is a “fair deal”. Comparing Sanford to the state average we are paying six cents more a month, but regionally we are paying 47 cents less. Compared to the U.S. average, we are paying 29 cents more per month in the winter.
So, What Is the Takeaway? First, we need to know that here in Sanford we actually have lower monthly residential electricity bills compared to the national residential average, but heating puts a strain on our wallets. State legislation and programs have helped us reduce our energy consumption, which is part of the reason we have lower electric usage, which translates to lower monthly electric bills. While we grumble every time we open our CMP bills, we are doing a lot better than the rest of Maine, New England, and the United States saving between $10 – $35/month. But the elephant in the room is our reliance on fossil fuels.
Heating prices are what kill our budgets. As Figure 2 demonstrates, the narrative that propane is less expensive is no longer true, but this data should also advise that electric is only a cost-effective strategy if an electric heat pump is used compared to inefficient electric baseboards to provide actual savings. The real problem with fossil fuels is that price fluctuations can happen quickly and affect our bottom line.
It should also be noted that electric is not entirely a “clean” solution. Most of the electricity generated in Maine comes from natural gas plants (30-36%) which are “cleaner” than coal or oil but still give off greenhouse gasses that have significant impacts on the planet and the shifts in seasonality we experienced over the years. The good news is Maine has invested heavily in more ‘ecofriendly’ energy production options such as hydroelectric, wind, biomass, and solar making up a total of 64 – 75% of our electricity production. The Sanford area has invested heavily in solar power. Over the longer scale, electric prices should stabilize, since they are less volatile than fossil fuels.
These ‘ecofriendly’ options are not perfect. Dams block fish passage and harm critical ecosystems. Clearing a forest for a solar project should make you scratch your head, and most people don’t want to see a windfarm from their backyard. The arguments for and against are long, but what’s clear is that we need solutions that keep more money in our pockets. Creative ideas like promoting solar on top of large shopping centers or over giant parking lots makes more sense than cutting down a forest; maybe it could reduce snow plowing time in parking lots. It has been done around the world, even in Alaska. These types of ideas need to be proposed not only to our state and federal legislators, but also to the companies within the energy sector. By working together, we can find ways to leave this world a better place for future generations.
So, there you have it, a (not so) simple answer to the question of how much we pay for energy here in Sanford.
John Henkelman is an Environmental Science Adjunct Professor at the University of New England and Registered Maine Guide.
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