In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a colder winter and a sharp jump in electricity rates exposed the complicated machinery behind an ordinary utility bill.
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.