New Hampshire doesn’t have municipal electric utilities – city-owned providers of electricity – but other New England states do. They have a lot more flexibility than large corporate utilities or even regional co-ops.
And here’s an example: 21 of them in Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island will be buying power from FirstLight, a renewable-only firm (mostly hydropower). Here’s a press release.
It’s not that big a deal, in a way – it covers the equivalent of only 23,000 homes. (Municipal utilities can be pretty small.) But psychologically, it’s great. Boost the market for renewable power and more commercial entities will join in.
And yes, I know that hydropower has environmental and social drawbacks. All large-scale power systems have drawbacks; the perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say.
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The city of Nashua has Two Hydropower systems both using the Nashua River as a power/flow source.
There is more power capacity available up to 800KW per system and use Archimedean Screw turbines placed on the Mine Fall Dame spillway and one or two of the flow control gates. The same applies to the Jackson Falls dam which could accommodate 6 systems across the river!
Problem is that no one wants to consider this available source to generate power as it is all political, yet is totally, environmentally sound and economical [the EU has thousands generating local power]. Also, the Nashua City infrastructure is in place and can easily be upgraded. Water power is what drove the Nashua City Mills.
Pennichuck Water Co [owned by the city of Nashua] has a possible source on the dams they have! This power could be used to drive some of their water distribution pumps!