The tick of the wall clock in Rep. Michael Vose’s Concord office echoed against the cheap pine paneling like a dare. Outside, the late-August air was pressure-thick—humid, motionless, waiting to break. But inside the old State House, something already had.
A single-page bill lay flat on his desk—no fine print, no riders, no multi-part clauses stacked like sandbags. Just House Bill 672—a legislative fuse that could rewrite a century of energy law.
“It would allow any power provider operating off the grid to bypass the regulatory thicket that’s governed U.S. electricity for nearly a century.”¹
Vose didn’t look up. “Every minute we waste is a year we lose,” he said, his voice dry and sandpapered from years of being ignored until the fire started. “If the grid can’t keep up, we’ll build without it.”
The lights buzzed overhead—fluorescents, not LEDs—and in their hum was the ghost of a larger crisis. Data centers, crypto miners, AI model trainers—every one of them demanding a kind of power that the U.S. electrical grid, stitched together with copper and committee meetings, can no longer reliably deliver.
“We’ve let regulation kill the experiment,” Vose said. “But New Hampshire’s done waiting.”
HB 672’s language was simple, but its impact wasn’t. Any electricity provider that didn’t connect to the grid could be exempt from utility regulation. No hearings. No lobbying. No plea before the Public Utilities Commission.²
Back in Washington, the idea was treated somewhere between heresy and science fiction. A Department of Energy analyst, requesting anonymity, sighed over the phone: “There’s a reason Edison and Westinghouse gave way to the TVA and FERC. Chaos doesn’t scale.”³
He wasn’t wrong. But neither was Vose, who had started quoting old-school capitalists instead of grid planners. “The sector wasn’t built by regulators,” he told a room of puzzled reporters.