(Opinion) In New Hampshire, your power bill is an asset hiding in plain sight

Jack Doueck

By Jack Doueck

Class A office landlords in Manchester spend enormous effort managing expenses, and electricity is consistently one of the largest line items on the operating statement. For most buildings, the entire conversation about power begins and ends with one question: “What’s the rate?” If your building is sub-metered, where tenants reimburse you for most or all of the electricity they consume, that may be the wrong place to start. As Eversource rates keep climbing, the cost of asking only that question grows every year. For Manchester’s largest office buildings, the gap between a good answer and a great one is now measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Eversource’s costs keep climbing. New Hampshire has some of the highest commercial electricity prices in the country, averaging around 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. In July 2025, regulators approved an 8.2% increase in Eversource’s distribution rates. The pressures are regional and structural: New England’s heavy dependence on natural gas and the winter price spikes that come with constrained pipeline capacity, plus grid-modernization costs recovered through delivery charges. For a Class A office building in Manchester that consumes millions of kilowatt-hours a year, that is a heavy cost against net operating income.

For buildings where the landlord absorbs electricity costs or charges tenants a flat per-square-foot amount, rising rates compound directly into NOI. The conventional response is still worth doing. Shop harder for a better rate, compare suppliers, lock in a fixed contract before rates move higher. But in a rising-rate environment, procurement alone is no longer the whole answer.

More sophisticated landlords are starting to ask a different question. How can our building generate income from the electricity it already consumes? That shift turns electricity from a cost center into an income-producing asset. In sub-metered buildings, owners can partner with energy suppliers and take part in programs where the structure of the power supply itself generates revenue. The infrastructure to do this already exists in most Class A properties in Manchester. The opportunity has gone largely unrecognized because the industry has only ever looked at energy one way, as an expense to cut. The owners changing that assumption are growing NOI without raising rents, without marking up electricity to tenants, and without deploying new capital.

Better rate shopping, tighter procurement, improved efficiency: all of it matters, and none of it changes the basic equation. In a market where Eversource costs are climbing and further increases are already on the calendar, the best-positioned owners are the ones who stopped treating electricity as only an expense and started treating it as an asset. The returns are showing up in their NOI.

The rate will keep rising. The question now is whether your building simply pays it, or also earns from it.

Jack Doueck has spent more than 30 years in financial services and energy. He co-founded Energy Marketing Conferences, the largest conference for retail energy suppliers in North America, and Grid Power Direct, a licensed retail energy supplier serving large commercial real estate owners in ten states. He is the host of the Energy Insider podcast, a published author, and a frequent speaker at energy and investment conferences worldwide.