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Energy Forward Act aims to open retail market to distributed resources; utilities and DOE raise practical concerns
Summary
House Bill 755 would require utility and market reforms to let distributed energy resources and aggregators participate more fully in retail price signaling and settlement. Supporters say the bill would clarify rules, improve data and enable competition; utilities warned of large system costs and settlement complexity.
Representative Kat McGee introduced House Bill 755, dubbed the New Hampshire Energy Forward Act, as a wide‑ranging package of retail market reforms intended to accelerate use of distributed energy resources (DERs), expand time‑sensitive pricing and enable competitive suppliers and community aggregators to offer advanced services.
The proposal would amend statutory definitions (including “grid modernization”), add a definition for “load reducer” up to 5 MW, and direct changes to metering, billing, data access and load‑settlement procedures so competitive suppliers and community power programs can contract for local generation, storage and demand flexibility.
Why it matters Supporters — led by the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire — told the committee the package would remove utility business‑process and data bottlenecks that have kept most residential and small commercial customers locked into flat commodity rates. They argued the changes would unleash private investment in local generation and storage, help flatten system peaks, and allow customers to benefit directly from avoided wholesale, transmission and capacity costs.
Utility and regulator concerns Eversource, Unitil and the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative said many of the reforms touch systems the utilities do not yet support and would require major upgrades to metering, meter‑data management, customer information and billing systems. Eversource cited feasibility work finding full AMI conversions and system replacement scenarios in the hundreds of millions of dollars and warned that changing settlement approaches and creating a new “load reducer” class could shift costs between customer groups.
The Department of Energy said it was neutral but cautioned the committee that similar issues are already being litigated at the PUC and that the department has questions about cost‑shifting and which entity (DOE or PUC) should lead certain rulemakings. DOE also noted FERC Order 2222 and ISO New England reforms are pressing questions for market access and aggregation.
Support from community power and vendors The Community Power Coalition (CPCNH) and proponents said clarifying the statutory rules would allow community power programs and competitive suppliers to contract for local projects and to settle exports and load reductions in ways that reflect their system value. Witnesses cited active vendor products for settlement and cloud‑based meter data management that can be implemented incrementally and at lower per‑meter cost for pilots.
Next steps The committee heard technical and policy testimony but did not take an immediate vote. The bill is likely to require close coordination with ongoing PUC dockets, vendor pilots and additional technical study to produce workable line‑loss and settlement rules.
Ending HB 755 put at the center of the hearing a persistent tension in modern grid policy: the desire to unlock private investment and competition at the customer edge versus the reality that accurate settlement, billing and distribution system operations depend on expensive, carefully integrated IT and meter networks.
