COVID-19
NH Ratepayers, Please Don’t Strike
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Please pay your electric bill! Ditto for your natural gas bill, if you’re a natural gas customer.
InDepthNH.org (http://indepthnh.org/series/power-to-the-people/page/2/)
Power to the People is a new column by D. Maurice Kreis, New Hampshire’s Consumer Advocate. Kreis and his staff of four represent the interests of residential utility customers before the NH Public Utilities Commission and elsewhere.
Please pay your electric bill! Ditto for your natural gas bill, if you’re a natural gas customer.
You don’t have to be a ratepayer advocate to sit up and take notice when someone claims that Eversource’s electric customers in New Hampshire overpaid more than $19 million dollars last year.
That’s why I was so pleased to learn that Liberty Utilities has scrapped its $400 million-plus Granite Bridge project with a new edition that is better and cheaper.
CONCORD — The state’s electric utilities have a conceptual agreement not to disconnect low-income customers unable to pay their bills until next spring.
“[I]t is the utility that must operate the system in the dark of night,” bemoaned the Granite State’s biggest electric distribution utility, through its lawyer.
Maybe, just maybe, after paying hundreds of millions of dollars and waiting 24 years, New Hampshire’s residential utility customers are about to get some real benefits out of the 1996 Restructuring Act. But not if Eversource has anything to say about it.
As with every fight over net metering, this is really a struggle between the solar industry and those who think solar panels are unfairly subsidized.
Oh, and did I mention operating costs? Here’s just a snippet. Eversource wants you to pay for millions and millions of bonuses paid to retiring executives.
With a global pandemic threatening to kill millions of people, and with the world’s economy having just sailed off a cliff with no bottom in sight, you might be looking for sources of inspiration here in New Hampshire. I have one.
We interrupt the endless argument about net metering in New Hampshire to bring you an important public service announcement. Energy efficiency is in trouble.