New Hampshire Clean Energy Guide

New Hampshire is not a renewables state, and pretending otherwise misreads the market. One nuclear plant, Seabrook Station, supplies more than half its electricity; natural gas covers most of the rest. Wind, solar and storage add up to just 228 MW, ranking the Granite State 49th in the nation. This guide covers what that thin market actually looks like: a hydro-and-wind legacy on the ridgelines, an RPS the legislature keeps trying to gut, and a siting regime where scenic-impact objections, not coal-vs-wind politics, decide what gets built.

The honest framing here is one of constraints. New Hampshire has the smallest renewable buildout in New England, the lowest net-metering compensation in the region, no state renewable tax credit, and a first-in-line solar project only breaking ground in 2025. Yet it also carries one of the highest low-carbon generation shares in the country, because nuclear does the heavy lifting. Understanding New Hampshire means separating "low-carbon" from "renewable," and understanding why the state's clean-power pipeline stays so thin.

Nuclear Runs the State, Not Renewables

Start with the generation mix, because it reframes everything else. In full-year 2025, nuclear supplied about 56.4% of New Hampshire's in-state electricity, natural gas 27.5%, hydroelectric 7.0%, biomass 4.14%, wind 2.46%, coal 1.24% and petroleum 0.94%. A single facility, Seabrook Station in Rockingham County (roughly 1,250 MW nameplate, with some sources citing 1,296 MW net), generates more than half the state's power. That makes New Hampshire a nuclear-and-gas state with high low-carbon output, about 69% low-carbon on a trailing-twelve-month basis, but renewables alone are only around 14% of generation.

The scale numbers are modest. EIA's New Hampshire electricity profile (released November 2025) puts 2024 net generation at 16,942,479 MWh, ranking the state around 41st nationally, on 4,470 MW of net summer capacity. And New Hampshire pays dearly for its dependence: retail rates run roughly 25-28 cents/kWh, about 30% above the U.S. average and among the highest in the country, driven structurally by pipeline-constrained gas, no in-state gas production, and heavy reliance on imports.

An RPS the Legislature Keeps Trying to Gut

New Hampshire does have a mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard, RSA 362-F, enacted in 2007. The total requirement climbed from 4% in 2008 to 25.2% by 2025 and then flatlines: there is no escalating post-2025 target. It is divided into four classes: Class I (new non-thermal renewables online after 2006, plus a later thermal-renewable carve-out), Class II (solar electric after 2006), Class III (existing biomass and methane), and Class IV (existing small hydro). Suppliers comply with renewable energy certificates or by paying Alternative Compliance Payments into the Renewable Energy Fund. Critically, the state missed its own mark: only about 13.7% of consumed electricity was renewable in 2024, roughly half the 25.2% target.

Unlike most of New England, New Hampshire has no 100% clean-energy standard and no economy-wide net-zero mandate, and the RPS itself is politically contested. In 2025, HB 219 sought to repeal the RPS minimum (RSA 362-F:3, effective end of 2030) and fix the Alternative Compliance Payment rate; the House and Senate could not reconcile competing versions and it did not become law, though the Senate did use the budget vehicle (HB 2) to raid Renewable Energy Fund surplus through FY2027. The House signaled it would revisit RPS restructuring in 2026, and it did: HB 1542 and HB 1721 renewed the push to eliminate or zero out the standard, both strongly opposed by the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire. This is where national repeal politics land locally, not through OBBBA tax-credit fights over utility-scale queues, but through a statehouse that treats the RPS itself as the target.

Net Metering and Incentives

New Hampshire uses a NEM 2.0-style tariff, not full retail credit. Exported energy is credited at a blended rate reported around 10.4 cents/kWh, the lowest net-metering compensation in New England. Individual net metering is capped at systems up to 1 MW; group (community) net metering allows host projects up to 5 MW-AC, with projects between 1 MW and 5 MW restricted to governmental members. The economics are unsettled: after an August 2024 settlement to hold rates, the Public Utilities Commission in December 2024 declined to approve the settlement or grant a 20-year financing runway, leaving roughly 700 MW of pending solar in limbo.

• Local property-tax exemption: Optional under RSA 72:61-72, adopted town by town at each municipality's discretion; a 2026 bill, HB 1002, would eliminate it.
• No state income-tax credit: New Hampshire has no wage income tax and no general sales tax, so the federal 30% ITC is the primary incentive for residential solar.
• Renewable Energy Fund: Funded by RPS Alternative Compliance Payments, providing state rebates and grants for solar, alongside Community Development Finance Authority programs.

The Projects That Actually Exist

New Hampshire's renewable fleet is small and mostly wind on the northern ridgelines. Five operating utility-scale wind farms total about 214 MW, and utility-scale solar is only now reaching meaningful size. The named projects:

• Granite Reliable Wind (99 MW, Coos County): The state's largest renewable facility, in Millsfield and Dixville, commissioned in 2011-2012 with 33 Vestas turbines (operated as Granite Reliable Power LLC).
• Groton Wind (48 MW, Grafton County): Twenty-four Gamesa turbines developed by Iberdrola Renewables, online in 2012.
• Lempster Wind (24 MW, Sullivan County): New Hampshire's first commercial wind farm (2008), developed by Iberdrola Renewables.
• Antrim Wind (28.8 MW, Hillsborough County): Nine Siemens turbines, reached commercial operation on December 24, 2019 after a multi-year siting fight; acquired by TransAlta in March 2019.
• Jericho Mountain (14 MW, Coos County): Jericho Power LLC near Berlin, online in 2015-2016.
• Poverty Plains Solar (4.99 MW, Merrimack County): New Hampshire's largest solar array to date, a $10 million, ~12,000-panel project in Warner by Encore Renewable Energy. It broke ground in mid-September 2025, is expected fully operational by summer 2026, and serves roughly 11 municipalities via group net metering. Its size is no accident: 4.99 MW slots it just under both the 5 MW group-net-metering cap and the 30 MW SEC-siting threshold.

The state's only utility-scale battery is a roughly 14 MW installation in the Berlin-Gorham area of Coos County. There is no announced giga-scale storage or a large solar pipeline waiting behind it.

Where Scenic Impact, Not Coal Politics, Decides Siting

New Hampshire permits large energy facilities through a single state board, the Site Evaluation Committee (SEC) under RSA 162-H, a one-stop process covering any generating station over 30 MW of any fuel type, plus major transmission lines and pipelines, and, since HB 609 in 2024, battery storage over 30 MW. HB 609 (signed July 26, 2024) shrank the SEC from nine members to five, eliminated subcommittees, and empowered the chair to make procedural decisions, an attempt to add continuity after more than 40 commissioners cycled through 16 cases in five years. Projects below 30 MW are permitted locally through municipal zoning and state environmental permits, which is precisely why utility-scale solar clusters at 4.99 MW.

What makes New Hampshire distinctive is the decisive weight of aesthetics. There is no statewide numeric turbine setback; the SEC applies case-by-case conditions on sound, shadow flicker and visual impact, and visual/scenic impact has repeatedly been the deciding factor. In February 2018, the SEC unanimously (7-0) rejected Eversource's 192-mile, 1,090 MW Northern Pass transmission line, intended to import Hydro-Quebec hydropower, on land-use, economic and community-impact grounds; towns along the route overwhelmingly opposed it, and the New Hampshire Supreme Court later upheld the denial. Antrim Wind tells the same story in miniature: an earlier, larger version was rejected over ridgeline visual impact before a reduced nine-turbine, 28.8 MW version was approved and built.

The most active opposition, though, is legislative rather than county-level. Because so few utility-scale projects are even proposed, there is little organized moratorium activity; the binding constraints are siting aesthetics, high project costs and a thin pipeline. The repeated RPS-repeal bills, the HB 1002 move to kill the solar property-tax exemption, and the December 2024 PUC non-decision on net metering are the real fights. Our New Hampshire opposition tracker follows these siting and policy disputes as they develop.

Demand Growth Is Regional and Electrification-Led

New Hampshire has no announced giga-scale AI data-center load. Unlike Plains or Southeast states, the demand story here is regional and driven by electrification. ISO New England's 2025 forecast projects New England annual electricity use rising more than 11% between 2025 and 2034, with winter peak demand climbing an average 2.9% per year, from about 20,483 MW in 2026/27 to 26,411 MW by 2035/36. Heating electrification is expected to add roughly 5,533 MW and transportation electrification about 1,509 MW to the 2035/36 winter peak. New England is a winter-peaking region, and the ISO expects winter and summer peaks to begin converging by 2034.

Price is the other pressure. December 2025 New England gas prices averaged $14.90/MMBtu, up 63% year over year, and the region imported about 1,048 GWh net that month; gas supplied roughly 54% of New England generation in 2025. High, volatile prices strengthen the case for behind-the-meter solar and storage, but they also fuel the political drive to cut RPS compliance costs. Utilities are leaning into targeted storage as a non-wires alternative rather than central plants: Eversource proposed a roughly $7 million, 1.7 MW front-of-meter battery in Westmoreland, a low-reliability area, expected to save ratepayers about $2 million, and both Eversource and Unitil run residential and small-business battery programs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Outlook: A Low-Carbon State That Won't Build Much New Renewable

The realistic read on New Hampshire is that it stays a high-low-carbon, low-renewable state for the foreseeable future. Seabrook keeps carbon intensity down; the RPS caps at 25.2% and the state already misses it; and the political momentum in Concord runs toward trimming, not expanding, renewable mandates. With net-metering compensation the lowest in New England, no state tax credit, roughly 700 MW of solar stuck in policy limbo, and a siting regime where scenic-impact objections carry decisive weight, the near-term buildout is more likely to come from distributed rooftop solar, group-net-metered arrays sized under 5 MW like Poverty Plains, and targeted utility storage than from any wave of utility-scale projects.

The pressures pointing the other way are real but indirect: 25-28 cent power, regional electrification adding thousands of megawatts of winter peak, and $14.90/MMBtu winter gas all sharpen the economic case for behind-the-meter generation and storage. Whether that translates into meaningful in-state renewable capacity depends less on federal policy than on what the legislature does with the RPS in 2026 and whether the PUC resolves the net-metering uncertainty it left hanging in December 2024.