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By Eversource Energy
From its vibrant cities and tight-knit communities to its natural beauty and scenic landscapes, New Hampshire is a truly diverse state that offers a unique blend of small-town charm and economic activity, attracting residents and tourists alike. Preserving the character of the Granite State means ensuring that the communities at the heart of it can continue to thrive, and electric reliability plays a critical role in our state’s collective economic vitality.
At Eversource, we continue to see firsthand how New Hampshire has been experiencing more frequent and unpredictable storms in recent years due to the changing climate, with four of the 10 largest storms in our history in terms of total customer outages occurring between December 2022 and April 2024. That is why we’re laser-focused on reliability and developing a stronger, smarter electrical grid that stands up to extreme weather and enables the increased interconnection of solar energy and other renewable energy sources that can further support our local economies.
Over the past five years, we’ve made significant investments in our electric distribution system in New Hampshire. Thanks in large part to our investments in automation technology—like smart switches—more than half of all New Hampshire customer outages last year, outside of storms, were restored in fewer than five minutes by our remote system operators. We’ve also deployed game-changing innovations to aid in storm response and reduce restoration time for our customers while improving public safety and the safety of our workers. Our Rapid Pole technology has helped expedite the restoration of power to thousands of customers in New Hampshire, including businesses, that have been impacted by storm-related pole damage. We also created and have been deploying our new cut-and-clear-trucks, which allow trained workers to more quickly and safely clear downed wires. These tools are already making a meaningful difference to help speed restoration, especially in small, tree-covered towns where one trouble spot can cause outages for hundreds of people.
As our state is one of the most heavily forested in the country, trees remain the primary cause of power outages in New Hampshire, along with public safety issues like blocked roads during storms, so our comprehensive and thoughtful vegetation management program is also critical to those efforts. Through this program, we carefully trim or remove dead, dying, and hazardous trees that threaten electric reliability while balancing the need to preserve the natural beauty and other many important benefits that trees provide.
Parallel to this collective work, we’re proud to have ranked in the top quartile nationally for reliability for the last five years, and we are committed to building on that strong track record of reliability for our customers. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on making our electric system smarter and more resilient with fewer outages, and we will continue to pursue all cost-effective solutions that enhance the safety and reliability of the electric system for our customers. At the same time, we will help to ensure customers can adopt new energy technologies as they choose—so we will all be more resilient for years to come.
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