Joe Nolan’s name is not a household word in New Hampshire, but it should be. As the chairman and CEO of Eversource, Joseph R. Nolan Jr. sits atop the tri-state utility empire that includes our state’s biggest utility. Nolan said something recently that made me sit up and take notice as our state’s consumer advocate, tasked with representing the interests of New Hampshire’s residential utility customers.
On May 9, Nolan and two other Eversource executives held their quarterly earnings call with investment analysts. Such events, timed to coincide with the release by publicly traded companies of financial results, are always fascinating for people like me.
Since I appear alongside utilities in lots of proceedings before the Public Utilities Commission, I am used to hearing executives of electric, gas and water companies whine about how tough their organizations have it. They eternally seek to convince regulators to embed lavish shareholder returns in rates, given how risky public utilities supposedly are (even though they provide essential public services to captive customers on a monopoly basis).
At quarterly calls with investment analysts, the tone shifts palpably. There, people like Joe Nolan make the case for how fabulously successful their enterprises are, the better to get the analysts to bid up utility share prices by recommending their stocks to investors.
Sure enough, on May 9, Nolan started with boasting of how Eversource kicked off 2026 “on a strong operational footing with a clear plan for disciplined execution of our key strategic objectives of safety and reliability, strengthening the balance sheet and derisking our business profile.”
Wow. “Derisking our business profile” is a phrase I have never heard in the PUC hearing room.
Nolan went on to praise his company’s “excellent operational performance” during a February nor’easter that was “one of the most severe blizzards to impact the Northeast
… in recent years.” Every electric utility loves to brag about its storm recovery efforts
since they offer heroic visuals, are hard to second-guess as imprudent and every
cent is recovered in rates.
It was all just routine puffery during the quarterly call until it was Q&A time. That’s when an analyst asked Nolan about Eversource’s affordability.
Responding, Nolan began with some rhetorical throat-clearing. He mentioned a new transmission line in Maine (not developed by Eversource), the newly commissioned Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island (once half owned by Eversource, but no longer) and the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts (in which Eversource has never had an interest).
“We’re injecting 2,600 megawatts of new power in the region” to moderate wholesale energy prices, Nolan said. He failed to mention that “we” did not include Eversource. Then the Eversource chairman’s peroration took its unexpected turn.
“Couple that with the fact that we are resisting data centers,” said Nolan. “I’m really not interested in the data center[s] coming here. It’s of no value to our residential customers — actually, any customer. It’s only going to drive up the price of energy.”
This runs up against a cinderblock wall of conventional wisdom. It is widely assumed that giant data centers will be a boon to companies like Eversource by jacking up demand and providing them with reasons to spend lots of money to increase the capacity of the grid.
Indeed, Eversource is busy asking federal regulators to approve a whopping big 11.39% return on equity for new investments in the region’s high voltage transmission system. Embedding that number in transmission rates gets even more attractive to companies like Eversource if they can point to rising demand from data centers as a reason to build more poles and wires.
So why is Nolan suddenly a foe of data centers? I have some theories.
Hegemony over customers, and certainly not customer empowerment, is central to the business strategy of a company like Eversource. Whereas big customers like to assert themselves, and data centers are the biggest customers of all.
In Utah, they are talking about building a vast data center that would use 9,000 megawatts of electricity — that’s seven and a half Seabrooks. Nothing even approaching that size is foreseeable here, but a 300 megawatt data center here and a 100 megawatt data center there and pretty soon you’re looking at a customer class that could and would talk back to its utility.
Imagine if we got some of these data centers and their owners found common ground with residential customer interests including, perhaps, the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire (which currently has nearly 200,000 customers). Together, these consumers would likely forge ambitious plans for demand-side management that could actually reduce the need for Eversource to pad its rate base further.
That would be a huge problem for Eversource, since multiplying the value of the rate base by the lavish equity returns embedded in rates is why Joe Nolan can boast so shamelessly during those quarterly calls with investment analysts.
Oh — and did I mention that last year Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed a bill into law, championed by the libertarian Cato Institute, that would allow data centers to bypass utilities altogether by going off-grid and building their own generation? That also threatens Eversource’s hegemony.
Please do not misunderstand; I am not a fan of data centers. A few months ago, I drove by the massive Quantum Frederick data center in Maryland — an obscene insertion into rolling countryside where Civil War battles were once fought. I dread what this could do to our state.
But I do wonder whether, if developed responsibly, data centers could help address the electricity affordability crisis. Since Joe Nolan hates them, I want to learn more.
Attorney Donald M. Kreis is the state’s Consumer Advocate, representing the interests of residential utility customers.