The surprise wasn’t the total. It was the supply charge.
For the century-old house a few blocks from Strawbery Banke, the electricity supply line on the bill was the one you noticed. Two years earlier it had been the sort of number nobody looked at twice, a quiet line buried among delivery charges and taxes. Now it stood out.
A typical month of electricity for the house—about 750 kilowatt-hours—once meant roughly $67 for the supply portion of the bill. Recently that same line could read more than $110, and that was before delivery charges, taxes, or heating costs entered the picture.
Winter arrived not long after.
One January morning the kitchen was still dark when the furnace kicked on. Down on Peirce Island the wind was running close to thirty miles an hour and the temperature sat at seventeen degrees, the sort of cold that cuts straight through a coat if you step out along the river path. The Piscataqua was moving hard with the tide, sliding past the docks the way it always does in winter, too fast to freeze.
Inside the house the thermostat crept upward and the furnace answered with a low rush of air through the ducts while the electric meter outside ticked forward again.
When the next bill arrived, the increase no longer seemed mysterious.
At first glance it looked like a single story—energy prices suddenly jumping. But the number on the bill was really the product of three separate forces that had converged on the same small house.
Over roughly the past two years, electricity supply rates for many Portsmouth residents have climbed by something close to seventy percent. Natural gas heating rates rose more modestly, roughly ten to thirteen percent over the same period. Then the winter of 2025–2026 arrived colder than most in the previous decade, pushing heating demand higher across New Hampshire.
When those forces stack together, they show up in the same place every month: the utility bill.
The mechanism behind it is simple but easy to overlook. Utility bills are not driven by price alone; they are driven by price multiplied by usage, and this winter both moved in the same direction.
Electricity accounts for most of the jump.
Portsmouth participates in the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire, a municipal electricity purchasing system that buys power on behalf of residents unless they opt out. The idea behind community power is straightforward: towns pool demand, negotiate supply contracts together, and try to secure competitive prices compared with the default rate offered by the utility.
For several years the approach often delivered modest savings.
As wholesale markets tightened, however, those savings narrowed quickly.
In early 2025 Portsmouth’s community power supply rate sat around 8.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. By early 2026 it had climbed to roughly 14.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. For houses like the one near Strawbery Banke, the shift translated directly into higher monthly bills.
Community power programs promise local control and competitive pricing, but they cannot escape the physics of New England’s electricity market, where natural gas often sets the price for the entire grid. In practice that means volatility is not eliminated so much as shifted closer to the customer, appearing directly on municipal supply rates instead of being absorbed inside a utility’s broader pricing structure.
Part of the increase traces back to the wider electricity market that supplies the region. Power in New England is generated largely by natural-gas-fired plants, so electricity prices tend to move with the gas market.
Over the past two years that market has been shaped by forces far beyond New Hampshire. Global LNG supplies tightened, European demand rose as the continent replaced Russian energy imports, and geopolitical tensions pushed traders to price in the possibility of supply disruptions.
That risk became visible almost overnight when fighting in the Persian Gulf halted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Crude prices jumped and gasoline prices in parts of the United States rose nearly 25 percent in a week, the kind of increase drivers notice immediately at the pump.
Natural gas markets moved with them. LNG cargoes shifted toward the highest-paying buyers, particularly in Europe and Asia, and New England—sitting at the far end of North America’s pipeline network—felt the pressure quickly.
A bill sitting on a kitchen counter in Portsmouth can therefore reflect events unfolding thousands of miles away.
The natural gas side of the story moved more gradually.
Portsmouth’s gas utility, Unitil, saw residential heating rates rise from roughly $1.48 per therm in 2024 to about $1.67 per therm by early 2026, an increase of around 12 percent. Beneath that relatively modest change the underlying commodity price of gas fluctuated far more sharply, yet the structure of regulated utility pricing spreads those swings across delivery charges and other components.
Those buffers soften sudden spikes before they reach the household bill.
Electricity markets rarely provide the same cushion.
The third force shaping the bill arrived from the weather.
The winter of 2025–2026 has been colder than most of the previous decade in New Hampshire. Heating-degree-day measurements—a standard way of tracking energy demand—ran higher than they had in roughly twelve winters by mid-February. Each stretch of cold pushed heating systems to run longer and harder.
Furnaces cycle more frequently. Electric heaters stay on longer. Heat pumps draw additional power to hold the indoor temperature steady.
Even stable energy prices would have produced larger bills.
When higher prices coincide with higher demand, the effect compounds. That is why the number on the bill—the one line no one used to notice—suddenly commands attention.
Inside the house the routine still feels simple. The thermostat rises a few degrees, the furnace switches on, and warm air moves through the rooms while the cold presses quietly against the walls.
Behind that moment sits a far larger machine: global fuel markets, regional power grids, municipal electricity contracts, regulatory pricing formulas, and a winter cold enough to make all of them visible at once.
The wind was still whipping across Peirce Island the next morning, bending the bare trees along the river path. The Piscataqua kept running with the tide, the current sliding past the docks too fast for ice to form.
Inside the century-old house near Strawbery Banke the furnace clicked on again.
The sound was the same as it had always been.
But the small line on the bill—the one nobody used to notice—is now where the larger forces of energy markets, geopolitics, and winter itself quietly arrive.
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Bibliography
1. City of Portsmouth. Community Power Coalition Rate Announcements, 2024–2026. Municipal notices documenting electricity supply rates for Portsmouth residents enrolled in community power.
2. Unitil Corporation. New Hampshire Residential Gas Rate Filings, 2024–2026. Utility tariff filings detailing residential heating rates and cost-of-gas adjustments.
3. WMUR News. “Heating Demand Highest in 12 Years After Cold Start to Winter.” February 2026. Reporting on heating-degree-day data and below-average winter temperatures across New Hampshire.