On a sunny, 85-degree day in August of 2025, some 9,300 oysters were loaded into ice-filled containers on southern Maine’s Casco Bay. The boat shuttling them from the warm, shallow waters of Recompense Cove to the marina two miles away hummed quietly. Notably missing: the roar of an engine and the smell of diesel. 

Heron, the boat in question, is a 28-foot aluminum vessel that runs on two 100 percent electric outboards, the motors that hang off of small and medium-sized boats. It’s one of the first commercial workboats in the United States to use electric outboards. The vessel officially splashed into the waters of South Freeport, Maine, on July 17, 2025. The moment, though, had been years in the making. It required a coalition of industry-wide partners, a $500,000 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant, and at least that much in matching funds from the operating businesses’ cost share agreement and philanthropic investments through the Rockland, Maine-based Island Institute, the Maine Technology Institute, and others. Altogether, the $1 million private-public investment covers Heron’s $425,000 sticker price and the costs to install two high-capacity shoreside chargers. A portion of these funds also supports data collection and research to assess the viability of electric technology in the greater aquaculture industry. 

Willy Leathers is the director of farm operations and owner of Maine Ocean Farms, the mid-size aquaculture business that operates this particular boat. The 10-acre plot he and farm co-founder Eric Oransky tend to on Recompense Cove holds about 3 million oysters. The two farmers are among a growing group of small business owners on the cutting edge of marine innovation along rural and remote parts of Maine’s coast. They’ve been in operation together just shy of a decade, and have seen the aquaculture industry spring up around them in the coves and small islands that make up Casco Bay. Beyond the bay is the wide-open Gulf of Maine, which has been documented as one of the world’s fastest-warming bodies of water. Between 2004 and 2016, it warmed more quickly than 99 percent of the global ocean, a trend scientists attribute to climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels. 

For Leathers and Oransky, there’s a connection between electrifying operations and transitioning away from the fossil fuels that have impacted their home waters. But beyond reducing environmental impact, the farmers say there’s another motivator: being a good neighbor. One feature of replacing traditional gas and diesel-powered outboards is that the electric versions are quieter.

“Our boats are our workplaces,” said Leathers. “We’re out there for eight hours a day, five days a week, so reducing noise and reducing on-site emissions is a goal of not only improving the workplace but also improving our potential impact on the environment around us, whether in an ecological sense or a community sense.”

Staying in the community’s good graces is essential for a business that operates year-round in close quarters with at least a dozen other farms, as well as traditional fisheries and shorefront landowners. 

By the winter, Leathers and his crew expect to load between 10,000 and 15,000 oysters onto Heron each day they harvest. When the temperatures drop, they’ll no longer need containers filled with ice to keep the oysters cool. What the farmers don’t know is how the technology in their new battery-powered boat will fare in these cold, salty conditions. Part of their mission, and the DOE grant agreement, is to find out.

“There’s a great proving ground here, of saying if this technology is going to develop, this is a place where it’s going to be put through its paces,” Leathers said. 

A tractor for the sea

A few miles down the coast, Chad Strater cruised up the Cousins River in Yarmouth, Maine on his 26-foot, all-electric workboat. He was headed to the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, a nonprofit waterfront facility he co-owns and is actively transforming into what he calls an “aquaculture innovation hub.” 

Since its launch last fall, Strater has used his electric boat almost daily for the marine construction work he does with his own business, the Boat Yard, and with partner Shred Electric, a startup that replaces gas generators with batteries to power sea farm equipment. Both the Boat Yard and Shred Electric share space at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation’s Yarmouth facility. Strater’s boat has one battery-powered outboard that can haul equipment to sea farms and other marine businesses within a 15 mile radius on Casco Bay. Nick Planson, Shred Electric’s CEO and Strater’s business partner, said the two were impressed by the boat’s performance during the winter.

The switch to an electric outboard was born of necessity, Strater said. When using a gas-powered boat, he’d lose fuel from idling and maneuvering the boat around work sites. Now, Strater’s success with the electric boat doubles as a model for others in the marine industry, like sea farmers, who are curious about making a switch. 

“You need the right tools to do the job,” said Strater. “You can’t be out there farming potatoes in a tractor from 1982 and expect to be efficient. So developing tools that make sense for efficiency, for Maine sea farmers, is what we’re doing.”

In this early stage of marine electrification, aquaculture operations, or sea farms, are a logical use case, said Lia Morris, the senior community development officer at the Island Institute’s Center for Marine Economy. That’s because farmers have known variables like range, location, capacity, and schedule that tend not to change. Morris is working with Willy Leathers and Maine Ocean Farms on data collection and analysis as they compare their new boat, Heron, to a control: their existing gas-powered workboat. 

“It’s almost like writing the case studies,” said Morris. “It’s putting the qualitative and quantitative data on paper and presenting the solution so that people can see how they can replicate it. That’s part of our long game in terms of outboards and commercial adoption.”

Still, there are significant hurdles when it comes to scaling up electrification in Maine’s aquaculture industry. Up front, electric boats are anywhere from 20 percent to 30 percent more expensive than gas-powered ones. Once they’re in the water, charging is difficult because Maine’s sea farms are spread across a vast and mostly rural area that is largely unequipped with the charging infrastructure this transition will require. 

“It’s the chicken and the egg problem,” Leathers said. “What comes first? You put a charger in and there’s nobody to use it, or you have a bunch of boats waiting to charge, but then nobody wants to invest in the boats because there’s nowhere to charge them.”

Uncharted waters

Like Leathers’ boat Heron, Strater’s boat was funded in part by federal and philanthropic support, including grants from some of the same institutional partners like Island Institute and Maine Technology Institute. About half of the boat’s cost, which comes in around $100,000, was financed with private investment and loans from the Coastal Enterprises Inc., a community development financial institution that helps Maine’s small businesses access lending. 

Strater said the boat’s relatively low cost, about a fourth of the price tag on a boat like Leathers’ Heron, is an important part of the pilot model, since many small business owners can’t foot a several hundred thousand dollar investment up front. He and Planson have worked with the Coastal Enterprises Inc. on a marine green loan program to set up additional financing options apart from federal and philanthropic grant structures. It’s part of Planson’s philosophy to “de-risk” electrification for farmers who want to try the new technology without financial strain.

“We’re working towards having all of these solutions be affordable without grant funding,” said Planson. 

For now, that’s an uphill climb. In Maine, it comes at a time when marine businesses are already struggling to overcome rising costs associated with working on a rapidly developing coastline.

In the early 2000s, nonprofit and government entities in Maine identified a growing risk to the state’s “working waterfront,” a term used to describe the network of access points that marine industries, including the state’s $3.2 billion seafood sector, depend on to make a living. A 2006 report commissioned by the Island Institute found that of Maine’s 3,500 miles of coastline, only 20 miles were dedicated working waterfront space. 

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association listed climate change, sea level rise, and real estate development as ongoing threats to Maine’s working waterfront in a 2020 report. Of the state’s remaining 20 miles of working waterfront, NOAA wrote that just eight miles are dedicated for public use. The remaining 12 miles are privately owned and thus vulnerable to residential or commercial development. 

Rebecca Rundquist is a board member of the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, the nonprofit organization focused on protecting Maine’s working waterfront whose marina provides space for Strater and Planson’s electric boat. She said that development along the coast, and in a small town like Yarmouth, affects local food sources and the economy. She sees innovation as a way to “revitalize” communities and generate excitement around the working waterfront at a hyper-local scale.

“Our message is we don’t have a one-size-fits-all. We’re here to show how you work with your community to identify the most important needs with these parcels,” said Runquist.

In Yarmouth, the need revolves around aquaculture and electrification. Both Strater’s boat and Heron, the electric vessel operated by Maine Ocean Farms, will soon have access to a higher capacity level two charging station at the Sea Meadow Marine Foundation along the Cousins River. Once it’s installed, the boats will be able to get a full charge in a matter of hours as opposed to the overnight shift they plug in for now. The funding for the station comes from the Island Institute and the Island Institute and the DOE grant that helped build Heron. 

While it’s a start, those involved on Casco Bay recognize there’s more progress to be made on charging infrastructure, particularly as businesses up the rural parts of the coast go electric. Island Institute is preparing to release a Shoreline Charging Infrastructure report later this year detailing specific challenges around grid readiness for marine electrification in Maine.

“It will be a public resource that people can read and digest and ask questions,” Morris said. “Our goal and hope is really to elevate the conversation around electrification and electric propulsion.”

Finding a charge

For now, Strater keeps things simple. At the end of his workday, he docked the boat along the Cousins River and headed toward a Ford charger, the same one he uses to charge his all-electric Ford Lightning truck when it’s parked at the marina. The low-capacity level two charger is mounted on a wooden post a few yards from the shore. Strater grabbed a thick charging cable to run back down toward the water, and  a light blinked green on the charger as he plugged the cable into the all-electric outboard, hovering several feet out of the water. The boat would sit there, slowly charging, for the next eight hours. 

Usually, the down time isn’t a problem for Strater, who puts in eight-hour workdays on the boat and then leaves it overnight to charge. In the instance he does need a quick fill, he can tow the boat over land with his Ford Lightning to a Tesla fast charger off the nearby interstate.

At the front edge of innovation, it’s this kind of creativity that makes Morris excited about the future of electric boat adoption in the region. “Mainers are scrappy and, you know — rural context — people figure out how to make things work,” Morris said.

Reporting for this article was made possible by the Guerry Beam Memorial Reporting Grant award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.