This story was originally produced by the New Hampshire Bulletin, an independent local newsroom that allows NHPR and other outlets to republish its reporting.
A bill that cleared the New Hampshire Legislature last week would create a framework for residents to be compensated for renewably generated electricity they feed into the grid from home battery systems.
It is a “modest step forward” for New Hampshire’s net metering policies, said Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, at an April hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
House Bill 1718, from prime sponsor Rep. Michael Vose, an Epping Republican, directs the New Hampshire Department of Energy and Public Utilities Commission to create a framework for crediting electric customers for power they export to the grid from batteries charged by renewable power generators, like solar panels.
The Senate passed the bill on Thursday, following House passage in March. It now heads to Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
“Logically, it makes sense,” Vose said of the bill in a phone call on Tuesday. “… If you can export the kilowatts, it doesn’t really matter whether you export them directly from your solar panels or from a battery, as long as you put those kilowatts in the battery with your solar panels.”
A limited number of New Hampshire electric customers are already net-metering energy from batteries through a program run by Liberty Utilities. Vose said enshrining the practice in law would eliminate uncertainty.
“The legislation basically removes any doubt from anyone’s mind that if they choose to do this, if they choose to make this investment, that they’ll be able to recover their investment,” he said.
As proposed, the bill calls for the New Hampshire Department of Energy to craft rules to govern how battery systems are installed in customers’ homes and interconnected to the grid. Those rules may include safety requirements or size restrictions, according to the bill’s language. Meanwhile, the rate structure for how residents would be credited for energy from their batteries would be up to the Public Utilities Commission, which the bill says may develop “terms and conditions” for customers to export energy and be compensated.
Batteries eligible to participate in the program must be configured to charge only from on-site renewable generation, except in certain cases that Deana Dennis, director of regulatory affairs for the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire, called “common sense” exemptions during the April hearing. Those include residential batteries that utilities may manage from offsite at certain times, such as in the lead-up to a severe storm or in preparation to offset demand peaks, she said.
Solar panels typically generate the most energy at midday when the sun is strongest, while demand for electricity in most homes and across the grid peaks in the morning and evening.
Batteries can help make renewably generated energy available at times of peak demand. And because of that, Vose said, they are an important part of making solar power pencil out.
“The only way that solar makes sense is if you can combine it with batteries,” Vose said. The combination of batteries and solar panels helps “ameliorate” the intermittent nature of solar energy, he said. At the April hearing, Evans-Brown made a similar statement, saying more widespread adoption of battery storage would “maximize the value” to the grid of variable distributed generation like solar panels.
Yet batteries are expensive, and that has posed a barrier to their widespread adoption. Industry and government groups estimate that the installation of residential solar batteries lags far behind the adoption of residential solar panel installations in New Hampshire.
A March report from the Solar Energy Industries Association estimated that 6.2% of New Hampshire homes have solar panels installed; Megan Stone, legislative liaison with the New Hampshire Department of Energy, cited data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showing that 25,467, or 2.9%, of the state’s 878,680 residential electric customers participate in net metering.
Meanwhile, utilities reported far fewer residential batteries on their networks: The utilities Eversource and Unitil reported a combined total of fewer than 1,000 batteries in 2024, according to Stone, though data from Liberty was not included, and Stone noted the total may also exclude some installations that were not reported.
“It does cost more money to combine a battery with your solar system. But it should pay for itself in the long run, just by making the energy more available to yourself, and to the grid when it needs it,” Vose said.
In the past, Vose has criticized expansions to net metering. But he said this policy is not an expansion: The bill does not change the total amount of electricity that customers can get credits for, he said, just the time at which they may export the energy.
And in doing so, he said, it may help users recoup their investments while making solar energy more available to reduce peak load on the electric grid.
“It’s not that complicated,” he said.
