Dive Brief:
- The New Hampshire Legislature may ask the Public Utilities Commission to study whether Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) should be required to sell its power plants.
- Many of PSNH's customers have switched to competitive suppliers to take advantage of low natural gas prices and to avoid the utility's relatively high rates. A legislative committee is concerned this will leave a shrinking customer base to cover the costs of PSNH's power plant fleet.
- PSNH, a Northeast Utilities' subsidiary, wants to keep the plants.
Dive Insight:
About half of PSNH's load has left for other power suppliers. The utility has strongly resisted the idea of selling its three power plants arguing that they boost reliability and diversify the New England power market.
“We suspect that a careful analysis would point away from utilities owning their own generation assets, and ... so we suspect it would be to the benefit of the public and the ratepayers that they didn’t,” said Rep. David Borden, Legislative Oversight Committee on Electric Utility Restructuring chairman.
