About Community Power
What is Community Power?
Community power is a way for consumers to get lower electric rates by joining together. Community power is made possible by a state law that allows towns to form Community Power Committees that can choose the default energy supplier for the town.
NH laws split your electric bill into two parts – a distribution charge and a supply charge. In Campton, the distributors are Eversource and NHEC. They provide the power lines, deliver the power into your home and manage the billing. The suppliers are companies that generate power from gas, nuclear, solar, wind and other sources. While you can pick your own supplier, most people just use the default provider selected by the distributor.
Once community power is set up, you can still pick your own supplier, but the default for people who have not explicitly chosen a provider will be the deal that was negotiated using the combined purchasing power of all the towns in the coalition.
The towns that are currently in the coalition offer consumers an option to get the Granite Basic rate, which is 14% cheaper than the Eversource default, or pay a small premium to have some or all of their power come from renewable sources.
Community power in each town works according to an Electric Aggregation Plan (EAP) which sets how the town will negotiate on behalf of the citizens. The EAP proposed for Campton guarantees that it will save money: any deal has to be cheaper than the old default rate or we don’t switch. Also, the town itself is not responsible for any expenses. The EAP has to be approved in a town meeting before anything further can happen. The community power committee works with the state coalition to negotiate the best deal, but this deal then has to be approved by the select board to insure it will save everyone money.