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.