April 14, 2026 — Getting vessels to convert to electric or hybrid power is kind of a chicken or the egg problem, according to Lia Morris, leader of the Marine Decarbonization program at the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.
“Boats aren’t going to convert unless there’s infrastructure,” says Morris. “We wanted to see what that would look like, so we commissioned a study with Homarus Strategies and Haley Ward Inc. There are so many parts to the puzzle. We wanted to see what type of vessels and which ports along the Maine coast would be best for going electric.”
Noah Oppenheim, the principal at Homarus Strategies, has been at the interface of fisheries and fisheries policy for the past decade. He compiled a detailed report outlining the requirements for creating the charging infrastructure needed to support an increasing number of electric and hybrid boats in various use scenarios, including ferries, aquaculture, and commercial fishing.
Oppenheim and the research team looked at things like distance from the grid, number of boats that could be served, the likelihood that the boats in a harbor would want to use electric power, and whether the harbor lent itself to hosting the necessary infrastructure. “We scored the ports along the coast and created a map of the most viable locations,” he says, noting that the map of those towns is in the report.