Letter: State, utilities need to take energy strategy seriously

Responding to Dan Weeks’s column headlined “Setting the stage for a clean energy boom in New Hampshire” (Monitor Forum, April 6), Eversource spokesman Martin Murray wrote, “The fact is that both residential solar and large-scale hydroelectricity will play important roles in New England‘s energy future” (Sunday Monitor letters, April 8).

However, Murray has confused the clean energy needs of New England with those of New Hampshire.

The 2014 New Hampshire State Energy Strategy specifically identified utility scale and residential solar as having the best “resource potential” for power generation and energy infrastructure in our state, and it marked the expansion of these technologies a “near-term priority.” It also addressed utility scale PV (photovoltaics) and offshore wind for their “magnitude of technical potential” and as especially attractive long-term solutions. Last, the strategy also included terrestrial wind-generated electricity for its economic potential to expand, near-term, in-state renewable power.

But large-scale hydroelectricity from Canada didn’t qualify for New Hampshire’s homegrown energy independence strategy.

In February, with Northern Pass on its deathbed, N.H. Consumer Advocate, Donald Kreis, wrote in his InDepthNH.org column, “One would hope that the SEC’s decision would point Eversource and other industry players in the direction of more local and small-scale projects when it comes to needed improvements to our energy infrastructure.”

One would also hope the state will end what Weeks called “the artificial 1 MW net metering cap that currently constrains clean power generation.”

Isn’t it time our legislators and the state’s franchised incumbent utilities take our energy strategy seriously?

TERRY CRONIN

Hopkinton