Vose: Community Power Report Card: On Its 5th Anniversary, It Gets A D-Plus

By Michael Vose, NH Journal

On Oct. 1, 2021, the New Hampshire secretary of state’s office legally incorporated a new nonprofit electricity supplier called the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire (CPCNH). This new corporation had 14 original members. As we approach the fifth anniversary of its inception, CPCNH has grown to 60 members serving 190,000 individual customers.

State law RSA 53-E governs the operation of CPCNH. This statute permits aggregating municipal electricity needs for the purpose of lowering costs by buying in quantity.

CPCNH goes beyond mere aggregation of electricity demand, however, by offering to help municipalities pursue climate and carbon-neutrality policies, balancing different communities’ energy goals and advocating for communities and customers before the Legislature and the Public Utilities Commission (PUC).

CPCNH attracted the most attention with its promise of lower-cost electricity. More than 90% of customers who signed on opted for basic service, which promised the lowest costs. That promise went up in smoke in February 2025. Costs climbed above utility rates, and customers began to complain. Municipal officials who promised lower costs to convince voters to adopt community power suddenly found themselves unable to live up to that bargain.

Five years in, here’s a report card on CPCNH’s performance in these early years in three important categories: power procurement, organizational structure, and transparency and communication.

Power Procurement

CPCNH started serving customers in 2023 and used an active portfolio-management strategy to acquire electricity for its customers. Utility procurement practices differed because utilities acquire the amount of power needed to serve a given load every six months, and their plans are examined and approved by the PUC.

CPCNH knew its strategy exposed it to more risk, but the upside was savings for customers. The risk came from market-price volatility and differences between forecast and actual customer load. Utilities prefer that their wholesale suppliers assume those risks.

The CPCNH strategy had a lot of moving parts: expected customer load, weather-driven demand, customer opt-outs and opt-ins, the timing of new communities entering the program, wholesale energy prices, capacity, transmission, ancillary services, RPS obligations and the timing of its hedges.

Managing all this complexity proved difficult. CPCNH later acknowledged that it did not hedge enough, had excessive exposure to market prices, failed to disclose the magnitude of that exposure to its board as required by its risk-management policy, set rates below what contemporary forward prices indicated were necessary and ultimately had to buy expensive winter power in the ISO-NE day-ahead and real-time markets.

Those mistakes forced CPCNH to draw down its $8.4 million in reserves. Replenishing those reserves ultimately required a rate increase that wiped out its price advantage over utilities. That rate increase persists today and likely will go on for some time.

Report card for procurement: D-minus

Organizational Structure

CPCNH created a complex organizational arrangement for its members. It featured a Joint Powers Agreement, a Cost-Sharing Agreement, and individual aggregation plans by each member, in addition to a set of corporate bylaws, all to govern operations.

This structure tried to anticipate future events such as the arrival and departure of individual customers and municipal members. It was important, for example, to prevent such movement from shifting costs from a departing member to the remaining members.

When rates went up in February 2025 and did not come back down again, many municipal officials found themselves the target of irate customers who demanded lower electricity costs, as they had been promised. While individual CPCNH customers could always voluntarily opt out of their community aggregation and return to their utility, many were angry that they would need to take such action.

Several member towns decided to withdraw from the coalition. Doing so exposed a potential weakness in CPCNH’s organizational structure: While a withdrawing member remains responsible for costs incurred on its behalf, the only mechanism for paying those costs is the aggregation’s revenue stream. If a town simply steps away and the revenue stream stops, the coalition has no way to recover incurred costs because state law specifically prohibits taxpayer funds from being used for community aggregations.

Report card for organizational structure: D-plus

Transparency and Communication

With a website that covers all the bases, regular online meetings (including open board meetings) for members and an email newsletter for customers, CPCNH has done a good job of providing information about its activities. It has also been forthright about its growing pains. While some will find the information too technical or voluminous, the coalition hasn’t skimped on detail.

With one glaring exception: Its power procurement practices remain opaque, and a member town will struggle to see how much power the coalition has committed to acquiring on its behalf.

Report card for transparency and communication: C

The Final Verdict

An overall fifth-anniversary report card yields a D-plus, leaving plenty of room for growth and improvement for CPCNH in the next five years.

Former state Rep. Michael Vose served until recently as chairman of the House Science, Technology and Energy Committee and chairman of the Epping Energy Aggregation Committee. He wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.