The Maine Community Power Cooperative is designed to reduce electricity costs for all Mainers and provide the simplest customer experience. Our goal is to maximize your savings and minimize the time you spend thinking about your bills.
Here’s how it works:
1. Sign up to join the cooperative and connect your utility account:
- Become a Member: Head to our website and click Become a Member
- Create your account: Enter your name, email address, and phone number
- Connect your Central Maine Power account: This lets us review your electricity usage history
- Choose your discount rate: We offer a sliding-scale discount with three options:
- 10% discount: Small businesses or residential members supporting the sliding-scale model
- 15% discount: Standard residential membership
- 20% discount: Income-eligible households earning less than 80% of area median income, subject to verification. If you receive benefits like SNAP, TANF, or others then you would qualify for this discount rate.
2. Purchase your membership share
When you sign up to join you become a member-owner of the cooperative, so you have a say in how the cooperative is run.
All members purchase a membership share. A membership share represents your ownership stake in the cooperative. It is a one-time payment that gives you full membership rights, including access to cooperative services, and voting privileges. Your membership share is fully refundable if you choose to leave the cooperative. There are no additional costs to join or maintain your membership, and you can choose to leave at any time.
You can either:
- Pay in full: pay $100 in full today, or
- Pay in installments: start for $0 and then pay $10 monthly installments on your bill, beginning once you start saving on your electricity bills through our program.
3. We review your account and match you to a solar project
Once you're signed up, our team will analyze your historical electricity usage to make sure that we are able to save you money every month. If we need to coordinate switching your community solar subscription or making other changes to your utility account, we’ll guide you through the process.
Whenever we have capacity in one of our solar projects, we’ll match new members to our projects based on their account details and electricity demand.
Until you’re assigned to a project, no changes will take effect on your utility account. Continue paying your Central Maine Power bill as usual until your assignment is confirmed.
4. You’re assigned to a project
We’ll notify you by email when you’ve been assigned to a solar project, at least two months before any changes to your utility account. We’ll provide step-by-step instructions to:
- Update your billing information
- Select your preferred billing method
We’ll also send you more details about the solar project you’re assigned to.
5. Your CMP billing cycle may change
To align with our solar projects, your billing cycle may shift slightly before you start receiving credits
6. Start receiving solar credits
After you're assigned to a project, you’ll start receiving solar credits from our project. The electricity you use each month (in kilowatt-hours, kWh) is offset by solar credits from our projects. Those credits are applied directly to your Central Maine Power (CMP) electricity bill.
If you use 500 kWh of electricity at your home or business, up to 500 kWh credits will be applied to your electricity bill to offset your usage.
We’ll bill you for the credits you receive each month, at a discounted rate that’s 10%, 15%, or 20% less than CMP’s rates. This means your overall electricity costs are lower every month. You can estimate your savings using our Discount Calculator.
7. Keep saving every month
We do the work behind the scenes to ensure that every month you receive the credits you actually need to offset your electricity usage - no maintenance required! We’re here to answer any questions you have about your subscription or bill.