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Les Otten Maine Energy Systems
to be,” he explains. “I started to look around at different industries, at anything that needed a fresh look, so I started to look at energy.” Otten makes no bones about opinions on the long-term viability of fossil-based fuels saying, “All the coal and oil that is on the planet was made in a 300- to 400-million-year period of time. And in the blink of an eye, in the timeline of the planet, we were essentially going to use all of it. It dawned on me seven or eight years ago that this was wholly illogical and that there must be an economy that can
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be built in response to this, one that made capitalistic and global sense for the use of biomass.” At that point, the earliest sketches of Maine Energy Systems begin to emerge, which would focus on biomass thermal, a low technology risk and simple solution for moving the Northeast away from the entrenched heating oil solution that dominated the marketplace. “We looked at it and realized this is a segment of the [energy] industry that doesn’t need new invention, it needs marketing,” he says. “It needs awareness. It needs government support, but it doesn’t need research.” Otten is nothing if not practical. Early in the development of Maine Energy Systems, he recognized that he and his team would have to devise a thermal biomass solution that didn’t require a significant increase in homeowner attention when compared to heating oil and propane. “If this is going to be successful in the U.S., there are going to be the hobbyists that are willing to work for their heat, but the majority of folks are not going to want to work for their heat ,they are just going to want to turn on the thermostat,” he says. While Otten’s team worked to devise a solution that would be attractive to consumers, or at the very least, wouldn’t turn them away,
he turned his attention back to the business and began working to build credibility with the lending and investment communities. “I remember speaking with some senior lenders at JP Morgan Chase discussing our industry and they said ‘we’d be happy to start lending your industry money, as soon as you can show us that you’ve got a thousand customers that have borrowed money, that have paid back the loans, that the fuel has been delivered, that the trucks exist, and that you are mainstream essentially.” The challenges for biomass thermal continued to emerge, as mortgage companies and the federal banks that guaranteed those loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, expressed concern that homes with pellet boilers would struggle to deliver full marketplace value. Struggles like these are a significant departure from the early stage work that entrepreneurs likely favor, but arguably more vital to Maine Energy System’s long term success and Otten embraced it. “Now we can show lenders that these homes and their mortgages can be sold even when their primary heating systems are not oil and gas,” Otten says. Otten and his team moved Maine Energy Systems through the proof-of-concept stage and are now working to wrestle market share from an entrenched incumbent. On this challenge, Otten has some incredulity to share. “The propane industry brags about its 92 percent efficiency, as compared to the 87 percent