PUC decision casts shadow on solar’s future in NH

The largest supplier and installer of solar energy projects in the Granite State believes a recent non-decision by the state’s Public Utilities Commission “makes New Hampshire very difficult to do solar at this time.”

Dan Weeks, vice president of business development at ReVision Energy, decried what he called “very poor state policy” that not only leaves New Hampshire with the lowest reimbursement rates for alternative power in the region but also leaves the future of those reimbursements rates in doubt.

“It’s obviously very disappointing to see New Hampshire continuing to miss the boat on what is now nationally and globally one of the biggest emerging industries,” Weeks said.

Weeks and ReVision Energy are not alone in their criticism of a policy that threatens future investment in solar, particularly large-scale projects.

“I think this is effectively a slow death sentence for the community solar industry in New Hampshire, as the period over which they know how to finance their projects will get shorter and shorter every year,” Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy NH, said in a written advisory to media.

Evans-Brown noted there are more than 700 megawatts of solar projects pending approval in New Hampshire. Since many larger arrays have had to wait nearly two years to simply get interconnection study results from Eversource, he said, “I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that based on this order, many of those projects will not happen.”

The issue revolves around net metering, which allows customers to receive credit for excess electricity they generate and then add back to the electrical grid. The New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission (NHPUC) in an early December decision let net metering stand at its current rate but left no assurances of what the future — if any — there is for continuing net metering.

As it is, New Hampshire currently has the lowest net metering reimbursement rate in New England.

“The rates right now are 10.4 cents per kilowatt hour,” Weeks said. “To put that in perspective, that is about half of what has been reimbursed under net metering by neighboring states over the last several years. It varies seasonally and state to state, but during periods of time other states have been well north of 20 cents, but generally they’ve ranged between the high teens to the low 20s, averaging in the region of 20 cents per kilowatt hour in all of our neighboring states.”

Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s average electricity rate is 24 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is 10% higher than the national average, and it has the fifth-highest electricity retail rates in the country.

New Hampshire’s Public Utilities Commission has spent the last few years trying to decide if net metering is unfair to consumers who don’t have access to renewable energy. While net metering benefits those with renewable energy (such as solar), the PUC, with the backing of outgoing Gov. Chris Sununu, has posited that it represents a cost shift that harms electrical consumers without direct access.

All the state’s electrical suppliers, environment groups, consumer advocates and others reached consensus in August 2024 by signing what is called the “Settlement Agreement on Net Metering Tariff.”

Basically, they agreed to leave net metering in place at its current rate.

Then the NHPUC in December neither approved nor rejected the agreement, putting net metering — and future renewable energy projects here — into a state of limbo.

“The key concession that they did not give to the solar industry was predictability,” said Evans-Brown. “The settling parties asked for a 20-year runway for new projects, to help them secure financing, and the PUC refused. As such, net metering ends in 2040, with no indication as to what will follow in its place.”

New Hampshire’s official consumer advocate, Donald Kreis, criticized what he called “the imperial PUC” for ignoring a consensus of all involved in the net metering issue. He had signed on to the settlement agreement.

“Though tasked by statute with serving as the arbiter between the interests of utility shareholders and utility customers, the PUC is indifferent to the consensus that frequently develops between those two groups,” said Kreis, whose job it is to represent the interests of residential utility customers before the PUC, as well as regional and federal decision-making bodies.

“Essentially, the PUC declared it was going back to square one and forcing the parties to relitigate every single issue related to net metering,” Kreis added in comments he wrote in an opinion piece for state media. “This itself is expensive, and guess who foots the bill for the cost of the regulatory process? Ratepayers.”

According to Weeks, studies have shown that net metering is a “win-win” not only for the solar user but for the electrical grid in general and those people who do not have direct access to solar. He believes Sununu has it backward.

“Governor Sununu, the outgoing governor, has long argued that there is a cost shift, and what he has meant by that is that people going solar are not paying their way, their fair share, and other ratepayers who maybe can’t afford to go solar are subsidizing them,” he said.

“He is right that there’s a cost shift, but the best data we have shows that it’s going in the other direction,”Weeks said. “Solar people making more power than they need are selling that power to the utility. They’re being paid by the utility through net metering significantly less than the utility then sells that same power to your neighbors at that roughly two times premium.”

“It has been a win-win, not just enabling those who put solar on their roof or other clean energy projects,” Weeks added, “but it has enabled those projects to also benefit the grid at large, which has been demonstrated in repeated studies by independent third-party experts looking at the value of solar on the grid, not just for the owner, but for the rest of the rate paying public. And the way that it provides that value is because net metering functionally allows the grid to serve as a backup battery for the local generator.”

Whether the new governor, Republican Kelly Ayotte, is more supportive of net metering remains to be seen. During the gubernatorial campaign she said she would be “open to looking at” net metering expansion but wants to “make sure that we don’t pass additional costs on to ratepayers.”

Founded in 2003, ReVision Energy is a 100% employee-owned, 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization with locations in Maine, Massachusetts and in Brentwood and Enfield, N.H.

Among ReVision’s projects in New Hampshire is a large-scale solar array atop the former municipal landfill in Jaffrey. (See NHBR story here: https://www.nhbr.com/revision-community-solar-farms-give-everyone-access-to-renewable-energy/)

The town would receive annual lease payments for use of the land, and residents and others in the Eversource utility territory would be able to buy shares of the project, lowering their electricity bills and supporting the environmental benefits of renewable energy.

But the lack of long-term predictability puts the Jaffrey project and others like it in jeopardy.

“We can only build when the numbers work,” Weeks said. “While we are always excited to put options in front of New Hampshire towns and cities and nonprofits and businesses as well as families, we know that increasingly the numbers just don’t add up.”

As for the specific future of the Jaffrey project, Weeks said: “There have been some changes in Eversource rates that make it more difficult, as well as increases in Eversource interconnection costs — very substantial — which were totally unforeseen. So we are actively in the process right now of evaluating what a realistic path forward is.”

ReVision will continue to do projects here, according to Weeks, but, when considering solar for their own enterprises, large commercial or business interests might take a long look at investing in solar and the return on their investment.

“We’re certainly not leaving the state,” Weeks said. “Even with very poor state policy, people going solar will see a return. It’ll just take a lot longer than in neighboring states. But if you’re a business owner, and you’ve got a limited amount of capital to invest, you need the quickest return you can get on that capital. By and large, they say no thanks in New Hampshire, and they say yes in neighboring states.”

Phil Coupe, ReVision’s co-founder, is looking ahead to an uncertain future for renewable energy with the incoming administration of Republican Donald Trump.

He is particularly concerned about inroads renewables had made with the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, invested federal dollars in domestic energy production while promoting clean energy. It was passed by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022.

“The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law include more than $400 billion in funding for domestic manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries. To date, these two efforts have unlocked more than $200 billion in private investments in U.S. clean tech manufacturing facilities,” Coupe said.

“Although there is great uncertainty about the real-world impacts of the incoming administration’s energy policy, we are cautiously optimistic that the national security imperative of the clean energy transition combined with the jobs and economic development benefits will prevent reckless dismantling of the core provisions of the IRA and Infrastructure Law,” Coupe added.