If you’re tired of soaring electric bills, you may be in luck this spring. Check to see if your town has a warrant article proposing a community power plan. If they do, you want to vote yes. New Hampshire loves local freedom and control. To that end, we have a law called “Community Choice Aggregation,” which lets our cities and towns take control of our own local energy costs. In short, it lets us band together to buy power at lower rates than we can get through Eversource or other third party suppliers. Eversource will still maintain our wires and help us when the power goes out. But on the electric supply side of our bills, community power is already helping dozens of towns across the state reap huge savings. Those savings will only get bigger, the more towns sign on.

With community power, we can also take advantage of things like net metering policies, where excess energy produced by something like solar panels on the roof of a town hall can make more money for the town to offset other costs like property taxes. In the long run, we can even use the money we are saving to build more clean, renewable energy sources for our electricity locally. In my hometown of Epping, we have been deliberating on this issue for many months, and have a wealth of information on our town website (townofepping.com/epping-community-power.) Vote yes on Article 20 on May 12.

Siobhan Senier

Epping