Who Keeps New Hampshire's Electric Bills the Highest in America — And How Much They Get Paid to Do It

To understand how a monopoly extracts capital from a captive market, you have to watch what happens inside the drab hearing rooms where the prices are set.

Eversource entered the summer of 2024 wanting a massive increase. While they calibrated their press releases to highlight a modest 17 percent overall impact to the public, the actual legal filing demanded something far more aggressive. The utility wanted to increase its revenue from distribution charges by 42 percent. Distribution is the toll you pay for the wooden poles and sagging copper wire outside your house. It is unavoidable.

The regulatory system is supposed to be adversarial. The utility demands a fortune. The state pushes back. They find a compromise that protects the public. That is the theory.

Here is the reality. The New Hampshire Department of Energy is the state agency nominally charged with hunting down the padded math in these requests. During this critical investigation, the Department of Energy simply let the clock run out on filing most of its written testimony. They failed to show up to the most important fight of the year.

This left the Office of the Consumer Advocate as the sole institutional voice fighting a 19,745-page avalanche of paper alone. A missed deadline. A silent regulator. A stranded consumer.

The outcome was completely predictable. On July 25, the Public Utilities Commission gave Eversource almost everything it asked for. They awarded the company 98 percent of the revenue increase it sought.

The mechanics of this increase are predatory. For residential customers, the utility did not just raise the per-kilowatt cost of running your dishwasher. They hiked the mandatory monthly fixed charge. Before the case began, it was under $14. The PUC approved a temporary hike to $15. Now, the fixed monthly charge sits at $19.81.

You pay that $19.81 before you flip a single light switch. You pay it if you leave the house dark for two weeks in August. You pay it if you install solar panels and use zero grid energy. By moving the cost into a fixed charge, Eversource immunizes its revenue against your conservation efforts. They built a toll booth you cannot drive around.

If you want to lower your electric bill, you need to know exactly whether the laundry is spinning during peak demand. In modern energy grids, customers use Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). These smart meters stream live usage data to your phone, enabling time-varying rates where power is cheaper during off-peak hours.

Eversource refuses to deploy them. In that same 19,745-page filing, the company printed a formal refusal to install AMI meters for at least another five years.

This is not a technology problem. It is not a budget constraint. It is a tactical decision to keep customers blind.

The Office of the Consumer Advocate looked at this refusal and published a document stripped of bureaucratic politeness. They asked why a utility would resist modern metering. The answer is devastating. The advocate stated that AMI services increase customer autonomy and undermine the utility's hegemony.

Read that word again. Hegemony. This is a state official explaining that a regulated monopoly is deliberately withholding technology to keep its grip tight over its customers.

When you cannot see your real-time usage, you cannot delay running the dryer until midnight to save money. You remain a passive consumer of a product priced by the seller. The utility preserves its informational advantage. The Public Utilities Commission looked at a company demanding a 42 percent revenue increase while openly refusing to modernize its grid for five years, and they stamped the paperwork approved.

By late July, Eversource knew the rate hike was secured. The new prices would take effect on August 1. They also knew that when customers tore open their August envelopes, the anger would be immediate.

They launched a preemptive strike.

Eversource purchased a sponsored post on New Hampshire Public Radio. They titled it with clinical detachment. They told readers that bills were going up due to summer usage. The copy explained that customers use approximately 20 percent more electricity during the summer months to stop window air conditioning units from melting down. They suggested turning the dial up to 78 degrees. They recommended buying caulk for drafty windows.

It was a masterclass in corporate gaslighting.

While running a paid media campaign blaming July humidity for skyrocketing bills, Eversource had not yet posted the new rates to its own website. They implemented the new, vastly more expensive distribution and energy charges on August 1, but did not file the new tariffs until August 11.

A monopoly secured a massive price increase from a compliant regulator. They kept the raw numbers buried from the public. Then they bought editorial space on a trusted public radio station to tell you the pain in your wallet was your own fault for running the air conditioner.

They do not just want your money. They want you to believe you deserve to lose it.

The rot extends far beyond local distribution rates. To understand the true scale of the extraction, you have to look at the wholesale power market. You have to look at how incumbent energy giants use physical steel and wire to choke out cheap competition.

For years, New England has desperately needed more baseline power. The New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) project was designed to solve this. It is a 1,200-megawatt transmission line built to pipe a river of cheap, clean Canadian hydropower down through the forests and into the regional grid.

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources estimated this hydropower would provide consumers with an average of 20 percent savings per kilowatt-hour, representing approximately $4 billion in total net benefits.

NextEra Energy did not want that cheap power reaching the grid. NextEra owns the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire. Seabrook generates over $200 million in annual revenue. A flood of cheap hydro would wash away those profit margins.

NextEra found a choke point. To connect to the grid, the NECEC line needed to route through an aging piece of switchyard hardware at Seabrook. That breaker was already operating at 99.6 percent capacity. The new power would push it over the limit. It needed to be replaced.

The project developers offered to write the check for the entire upgrade. It would cost NextEra nothing.

NextEra refused the free upgrade.

They used their control of one gray metal box to veto a multi-billion-dollar regional energy solution. This was not a passive administrative dispute. It was an active hostage situation.

According to a federal legal complaint, NextEra executives offered a naked quid-pro-quo. They told the developers they would call off their lawyers if the developers agreed to buy power from Seabrook Station at inflated, above-market prices.

Do you want to know how a monopoly protects its territory? It looks at four billion dollars in consumer savings and demands a toll. Buy our expensive power, or nobody gets the cheap power.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually stepped in, upholding the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's authority to force the upgrade. The court characterized NextEra's behavior in dry legal terms as inconsistent with good business practices. But the damage was done. The project was delayed for years. The cheap power was held at the border. The incumbents kept winning.

When you successfully block new supply from entering a market, the existing supply becomes vastly more valuable. The companies that create the scarcity are the ones paid to turn the lights back on.

The data confirms the squeeze. While nationwide average energy prices declined in 2024, wholesale electricity prices in the Northeast increased by 14 percent at the ISO-NE Internal Hub.

The regional grid operator runs a capacity market. This is a system where power plants are paid merely to keep their boilers warm and ready to generate power in the future. It is an insurance policy for the grid. Because new projects like the NECEC were delayed, the grid operator panicked about future shortages.

The price for that insurance skyrocketed. Capacity prices in the region climbed to $119.33 per megawatt-day for the 2027/2028 commitment period. For the prior two years, that price was roughly $86.

The companies that blocked the new supply are now selling their existing capacity into a market that pays a 39 percent premium specifically because the cheap power never arrived.

This is why geography is an alibi, not a cause. Look at neighboring states. Vermont has similar weather. It ranks 50th in the nation for net electricity generation. It burns almost no fuel of its own. Yet Vermont residents pay an average retail price of 18.41 cents per kilowatt-hour. It is the 10th highest rate in the country.

They are trapped in the same regional cage. The entire Northeast is structurally dependent on power pumped over borders and natural gas squeezed through narrow pipelines. When a single company can use a circuit breaker to hold the region hostage, the resulting price shocks bleed directly into every home and business. There is no buffer. There is only the bill.

None of this happens by accident. You do not get 98 percent of your requested rate hike without pouring the foundation. You do not stall federal infrastructure projects without political cover. You buy the referees.

Eversource and its affiliates systematically funnel cash into the campaign accounts of the people hired to regulate them.

In the 2024 cycle alone, Eversource Energy-related entities poured $50,000 into the Tell It Like It Is PAC, a conservative outside group. They wrote checks directly to decision-makers. They gave $1,000 to Governor Chris Sununu's campaign committee. They gave $950 to the New Hampshire Republican State Committee. They fund candidates across the spectrum who vote to protect their profit margins.

The return on this investment is spectacular.

Consider Senate Bill 206. This was a piece of legislation introduced in New Hampshire with a brutally simple premise. It would prevent public utilities from passing their lobbying costs on to customers.

Think about the sheer audacity of the current arrangement. The utility hires lobbyists to walk the marble halls of the state house. Those lobbyists fight against consumer protections, fight against grid modernization, and fight for higher rates. And then, the utility takes the money it spent paying those lobbyists and hides the receipt in your monthly electric bill. You are actively funding the people hired to make your life more expensive.

When SB 206 was introduced to stop this practice, an Eversource lobbyist was sitting at the microphone testifying. The utility apparatus fights relentlessly to protect its right to use your money against you.

The New Hampshire Secretary of State publishes quarterly lobbyist financial reports. The disclosures gather digital dust on government servers. They file in April. They file in July. They file in October. The machinery of influence grinds on, fully documented, perfectly legal, and deeply corrosive.

The white envelope arrives in the mailbox. Or the notification hits the inbox.

The customer opens it. They run a finger down the column of charges. They see the $19.81 fixed charge. They see the volumetric rate that spiked while they were supposedly keeping the bedroom too cold in July.

They do not see the 19,745 pages stacked floor-to-ceiling in a state hearing room. They do not see the empty chair where the Department of Energy was supposed to sit. They do not see the circuit breaker at Seabrook operating at 99.6 percent capacity, carefully guarded by executives demanding a ransom. They do not see the PAC checks cashing at a bank in Concord.

They just see a number they cannot afford, from a company they cannot fire, in a system working exactly as it was designed to work.