Maine’s two big investor-owned power utilities — Central Maine Power and Versant Power — are not very popular. In fact, they boast among the lowest customer satisfaction scores of any utilities in the country, perhaps because their customers face some of the nation’s highest rates, suffer more and longer outages than average Americans, and pay more to connect rooftop solar than ratepayers in almost any other state. This November, Mainers will vote on a radical alternative: a ballot measure to replace the two for-profit utilities with a single nonprofit utility that would be called Pine Tree Power. Maine and many other states already have lots of small nonprofit municipal utilities, but this would mark the first time a whole state with existing private utilities decided to make them public en masse.Naturally the utilities are opposed and have dumped $27 million and counting into a campaign to crush the measure; supporters have mustered just under $1 million. To discuss this David vs. Goliath fight, I contacted one of its champions, Democratic state Senator Nicole Grohoski. We discussed why she thinks a public utility would perform better, what it would do for clean energy, how it would be governed, and what other states can learn from the effort. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe