Sam Evans-Brown is executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire.
On December 1st, electric supply rates for Unitil customers went from 17.8 cents per kwh to 33.7 cents. When you get your next bill, it will be somewhere between $85 and $100 higher than your last one.
This summer, one in six homes was behind on their electric bill, a figure that almost certainly has only gotten worse as prices have continued to rise.
Your bill is going up because New England is too dependent on natural gas for generating its electricity, natural gas prices have gone crazy, and likely will stay high for years to come. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix to this problem, and insulating ourselves from volatile global commodity prices will take decades of focused effort to achieve.
However, there are steps you can start taking today to take control of your bill. We at Clean Energy NH have assembled many of these steps into a simple step-by-step road map and have posted them online at cleanenergynh.org/energy-savings. Here are the highlights.
Tweak yourself first: You know this already, but there is a lot you can do by simply fine-tuning your habits. Turning off the lights when you leave the room, lowering your thermostat when you’re not at home or when you’re in bed, shorter showers, and running only full loads of laundry or in the dishwasher. We’ve been posting zero-cost, energy-saving ideas all month on Twitter and Instagram, which you can find at the hashtag #CENHEnergyChallenge. You can also start to shop around for electricity. Competitive suppliers are offering rates below the utilities’ default rates, and you can compare their offerings at the NH Department of Energy’s website.
Move on to the low hanging fruit: Certain “investments” in energy efficiency are quick, easy, no-brainers that you should have done years ago, but which pay back even faster in this price environment. For example, we moved into our house seven years ago and have had nine halogen lightbulbs that entire time. One died in the spring, and I bought enough LEDs to replace the lot of them, but only swapped the dead bulb because (to be frank) I was being lazy.
With the impending rate hike, I finally got around to swapping out the other nine a week or so ago. Curious, I crunched some numbers and my laziness cost me somewhere between $100 and $200 over the last six months in higher electric bills. If I hadn’t swapped them this winter, it likely would have cost me $150 and $350 more. I’m a fool for not having done this sooner, and I hope you don’t repeat my mistake.
Plan for bigger improvements: If you have never done so, head to NHSaves.com and see if you’re eligible for a free energy audit. This is a professional assessment of what the highest impact improvements for your home or business may be. Given the high demand for this type of work and general supply chain chaos, it may be quite some time before you’re able to get a contractor on site. However, once you do insulation in your attic basement and walls has never had a faster payback than at current prices.
Start thinking bigger: Many of the key technologies for decarbonization run on electricity — heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and electric vehicles. While these appliances can and do pay for themselves in the long run, their value proposition is strongest when coupled with the ownership of your own generation, particularly in the form of residential solar. But since many buildings aren’t well-suited to onsite solar, determining how we as a state collectively take advantage of the falling cost of renewable energy will be the key.
You can push for your community to take part in the state’s soon-to-launch Community Power aggregation program, but ultimately we need more policy changes to lower our collective energy spending. For instance, community-scale solar arrays will be a key path to affordability, but projects of this scale are extremely difficult under New Hampshire’s current policy framework.
Ultimately, thinking deeply about how to take control of your own personal energy bill leads to the conclusion that individual action is necessary but not sufficient. We need wise and balanced policies that will encourage more local production and local consumption of the resources we have here in the Granite State, as well as strategic investments in using less of the expensive globalized commodities that are costing us so dearly this winter.
And when it comes to crafting such a policy framework, there has been a notable silence from the halls of power here in Concord. That silence is beginning to become unbearable.