Joyce Craig’s Energy Independence and Climate Plan  

For New Hampshire’s families, businesses, and communities to thrive, we need affordable, reliable power and a healthy environment. To lower energy costs for residents and small businesses, New Hampshire needs to diversify our energy sources to lessen the dependence on fossil fuels and invest in smart, money-saving energy efficiency programs and technologies. In the process, we will reduce our state's carbon footprint and protect our state for future generations.

New Hampshire is at an energy crossroads. As the price of fossil fuels continues to rise, innovation in green energy has made solar, wind, and battery storage cheaper and more reliable than ever. Our New Hampshire Energy Independence and Climate Plan will help families and businesses reduce their energy costs, create family-supporting jobs, increase grid resilience and innovation, and protect our environment and health.

New Hampshire is falling further behind on the transition to clean energy and continues to be over-reliant on fossil fuels resulting in some of the highest energy costs in the country. We must take action in order to help save residents and businesses from increasing energy costs.

I know how to make changes that reduce costs and help protect our climate. During my time as Mayor of New Hampshire’s largest city we delivered for the residents of Manchester. We built the largest municipal solar array in New Hampshire, lowered energy costs and led the state in clean energy, efficiency, and transportation. These initiatives saved taxpayers money on city energy costs and reduced Manchester’s carbon footprint by over 60%.

Our state has the opportunity to foster innovative cost-effective technologies and be a leader in developing a cleaner future for our communities and residents. The policies we put in place can benefit residents statewide and I am committed to working with our local communities to find renewable energy solutions that work for them, protect our state, and reduce costs.

Cut Energy Costs for Families and Businesses 

1. Building Efficiency, Reliability, and Resilience 

1. Expand the NH Saves Program and reduce new building energy consumption. Help more people and businesses utilize energy efficiency programs to save residents and businesses money through weatherization and electrification. 

2. Increase rebates for efficient electric appliances and heating. Including cold-climate heat pumps, which can reduce oil and propane consumption by 540 gallons per year for a typical home and generate $600 or more in net savings annually.

3. Increase energy storage options. Remove regulatory barriers to energy storage to reduce peak energy loads and provide more resilience for Granite Staters faced with power outages from extreme weather events. 

4. Cut state energy costs. Lead by example with a comprehensive program of weatherization and electrification of outdated state buildings to save taxpayers money and utilize state buildings for clean energy generation.

5. Modernize our electric grid to strengthen reliability and security. Develop a 21st century smart and secure electric grid with time-of-use transactive energy rates, which have the potential to reduce peak loads up to 15 percent with savings estimated at $50 billion annually nationwide. 

2. Local Power Generation and Diversification

1. Support New Hampshire’s growing Community Power movement.  Allow residents and businesses to offset their remaining energy needs with community power and let local generation projects serve community power portfolios.

2. Fairly compensate local energy generators. Ensure families and businesses who generate power and deliver excess energy to the grid are fairly compensated based on the actual value of their electricity to the public.

3. Expand Net-Metering. Allow families, businesses, schools, and nonprofits that cannot meet their power needs onsite to join shared generation projects such as community solar farms and small hydro up to 5 MW that unlock economies of scale and save all ratepayers money.

4. Expand the low-moderate income solar programs. Help Granite Staters on fixed and lower incomes access clean energy savings and lower their energy burden by expanding the state’s low-moderate income solar programs. 

5. Develop Offshore Wind and Revamp the New Hampshire Office of Offshore Wind. Take a proactive role in offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine – the region’s largest source of new power generation equivalent to five million New England homes – so we don’t miss the boat on a multi-billion dollar industry off our coast, lower energy costs, and bring high tech manufacturing jobs to New Hampshire.

6. Smart Energy Siting and Interconnection. Proactively identify highly sensitive lands and waterways that are off limits for energy infrastructure to ensure long-term protection and reduce project uncertainty and delays. Streamline project siting on already disturbed or contaminated lands (e.g. brownfields and landfills) and establish fair and transparent state rules for grid interconnection.

3. Clean Transportation Options

1. Provide incentives to enable lower-income Granite Staters to purchase low-emissions vehicles. Drivers can save upwards of $1,000 in annual fuel and maintenance costs with electric vehicles which are now competitively priced with traditional vehicles.

2. Rapidly deploy settlement funds for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Utilize funding granted to install public high-speed charging stations in high-traffic corridors.

3. Update and provide new public transportation options for Granite Staters. Help New Hampshire communities access federal resources and private investment for low-emissions school and public buses and multi-modal transportation. Bring passenger rail to Nashua and Manchester to lower transportation costs and local air pollution.

4. Develop more electric charging stations for Granite Staters and enable private-sector charging innovation. Remove undue barriers to private investment in electric vehicle chargers through reasonable utility tariffs and innovations like bidirectional charging that increase resilience and save ratepayers money.

5. Update state fleet vehicles. Replace decommissioned state vehicles with lower-cost zero-emissions alternatives to save taxpayers money.

Create Family-Supporting Jobs and Grow the Cleantech Economy

1. Cleantech Research & Development

1. Establish New Hampshire’s first Cleantech Innovation Council. Bring together local cleantech and climate leaders to develop strategies for attracting innovative clean energy businesses to the state.

2. Create incentives to incubate and scale new cleantech startups in New Hampshire. Focus on breakthrough technologies like long-duration energy storage, green hydrogen, networked geothermal, smart grid technology, and grid-edge solutions that can address our energy needs.

3. Build workforce and infrastructure to support the Cleantech industry. Build the skilled workforce and infrastructure needed to scale existing cleantech solutions locally.

4. Train the next generation of energy efficiency, power generation, and transmission workers. Partner with New Hampshire’s universities, community colleges, high schools, organized labor, and the private sector to help Granite Staters access good-paying jobs. 

Protect New Hampshire’s Environment and Public Health

1. Clean Air and Water

1. Strengthen New Hampshire’s commitment to clean air and water. Address known and emerging pollutants, with a focus on urban and low-income areas and communities of color that experience disproportionately negative health outcomes tied to climate change and environmental contamination. 

2. Address New Hampshire’s PFAS Crisis. Bolster the Department of Environmental Services’ ongoing PFAS response and secure additional federal resources and private-sector collaboration to investigate and remediate PFAS and other environmental contaminants.

3. Enact a moratorium on siting landfills to develop modern policies on protecting our state and natural resources. Ensure environmental protections for all landfill sites and end expansion of landfills for the purpose of accepting out-of-state trash.

4. Develop better air quality monitoring systems. Expand the Department of Environmental Services’ twelve air monitoring sites statewide to include communities with known or suspected air and water contamination issues and high asthma rates. 

5. Protect our water. Ensure strong protections for sensitive waterbodies such as wetlands, rivers, lakes, and coastal estuaries – and the countless species who call them home – that are being negatively affected by increased warming, stormwater runoff, ocean acidification, and cyanobacteria.

6. Develop an extreme heat and weather action plan. Including urban tree planting and public cooling centers, to mitigate deadly heat waves.

7. Hold industrial polluters accountable. Work with the New Hampshire Attorney General to hold industrial polluters including the fossil fuel industry accountable for their harm to public health and the environment, including by lying to consumers and regulators about the risks of climate change.

2. Healthy Farms and Forests

1. Develop a voluntary statewide Climate-Friendly Farming program. Work with the UNH Cooperative Extension and New Hampshire’s farming community to deploy innovative soil management practices that increase resilience and drawdown carbon while boosting agricultural productivity. 

2. Keep New Hampshire’s forests healthy. Work with the New Hampshire timber industry, universities, and landowners to promote science-based forest management practices and reward private landowners who manage their forests for reducing emissions over each harvest cycle. 

3. Protect New Hampshire’s Maple Syrup Industry. Support New Hampshire’s storied maple producers as they adapt to rapid winter warming through efficient sap harvesting technologies and expanded access to northern maple groves on state land

4. Save New Hampshire’s Winter Recreation and Outdoor Tourism. Work with New Hampshire’s multi-billion dollar outdoor recreation industry on climate resilience initiatives that can help protect our skiing, hunting, fishing, and other outdoor traditions in the face of climate damage.