The New Hampshire Senate wants you to pay more for electricity.
Budget writers added a provision to the recent Senate-approved budget to provide subsidies to businesses to generate electricity. This provision relies on expensive public policies known as net metering and group net metering. The Business and Industry Association supports the plan.
This perplexing policy change comes on the heels of March 2025 data from the U.S. Department of Energy showing the good news that New Hampshire and Vermont are virtually tied for the lowest electricity cost in New England at just over 22 cents per unit (kilowatt). The same data showed that Maine has the third fastest growing electricity costs in the nation, while Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have the highest costs in the region with unit prices eight to 10 cents higher than New Hampshire and Vermont.
Maine’s growing costs resulted in part from the 2022 increase to five megawatts of the allowable limit for net metering. The Maine Office of the Public Advocate has pegged the cost of this expansion at $220 million in 2025, with $161 million of those costs resulting from utility resale of exported energy on the wholesale market (more on this later), while $56 million comes from revenue losses for distribution. This $220 million gets passed along to all Maine’s ratepayers.
The Senate’s new plan creates a new category of customer generator called an “industrial host” and allows that generator to install up to five megawatts of generating capacity. It requires the industrial host to use 33 percent of the power it produces but allows it to sell the remaining 66 percent via net metering to other commercial, industrial, or institutional entities.
This policy will permit all Granite State businesses to become part-time electricity manufacturers. Businesses can potentially lower their electricity costs by generating some power for their own use and selling any excess generation to other businesses. Sounds like a winner for everyone.
Except for one little glitch. Because the electricity everyone relies on comes from the ISO-NE regional grid via the state’s utilities who own the grid’s poles and wires, any manufactured electricity placed onto the grid gets bought by those utilities, including behind-the-meter power. State net metering policy sets the rate that utilities must pay for that power and this rate varies slightly only twice a year, unlike regional grid prices that go up and down according to weather conditions and electricity demand.
When industrial hosts are credited at fixed rates for the electricity they provide to their group members via the grid, that credit comes from their local utility. Utilities will, in turn, sell that power to the regional grid because they previously contracted for all the power they need — that’s where the story can turn disastrous for ratepayers.
The grid price for that electricity will almost always be lower than the compensation provided to industrial hosts-groups and therefore the utilities will incur losses. The utilities will then, as guaranteed by existing utility law, recover those losses from all their ratepayers.
That means this new policy will force New Hampshire ratepayers to provide corporate welfare to New Hampshire businesses.
This program’s allowance of up to five megawatts massively expands the limits on net metering by 80 percent and will drive up New Hampshire electricity costs. Today, the state’s utilities recover $30-32 million in net metering costs from ratepayers. But as Maine’s experience over the past three years shows, those costs can (and will) escalate quickly, rising to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Senate’s plan may lower costs for businesses but will raise the overall costs of electricity for the rest of us, placing that burden on non-business ratepayers. Restricting this program to commercial-industrial users matters little since they use over 60 percent of the state’s electricity.
But the story gets worse. The Senate plan also extends these subsidies for 20 years from the date such a generation facility begins operation, a change to current policy that ends net metering subsidies at the end of 2040. This change guarantees that net metering costs will only grow over time and directly violates the state’s 10-year energy strategy of making subsidies “time-limited, narrow, or necessary to achieve a specific policy goal.”
Policy makers needs to face the reality that subverting market signals with long-term subsidies makes victims of the average citizen who has no voice in these deliberations. We forget those citizens to our disgrace.
