I’m Rebecca Beaulieu and I’ve been fighting fossil fuel power plants since I was in school. Today, I’m the Communications Director at 350 New Hampshire (350 NH), one of the 21 affiliate groups of 350.org in the United States.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and while my friends and I played soccer we could see (and breathe) the smoke coming from a dirty coal power plant right across the street. When the state finally closed the plant, the community fought hard for a transition to clean energy, just to see the big company that bought the plant transition it to a gas plant.
People like me are still fighting that fossil gas plant. And for me personally, that collective effort had a huge impact: it taught me that the climate crisis is intertwined with all aspects of our lives, and that community power is at the core of all justice fights.
When electricity bills here in New Hampshire suddenly went up 112% a couple of years ago, we took our fight against fossil fuels one step further. People couldn’t afford to pay those ridiculously pricey bills, and we realized it was our duty as climate activists to search for solutions – not only for cleaner energy, but for more affordable and accessible energy too.
Advocating for our climate and communities takes resilience. Every win is a step in the right direction, even if it feels small or incomplete – as it did for me and my community in Massachusetts. But sometimes we have big breakthroughs too!
We started our new campaign by going door-to-door to get information out to people about how they could get help from government programs to pay the energy bills, and we showed up up at Eversource (the electricity company over here) offices exposing how much they were profiting while dumping all the burden on our communities’ shoulders.
We decided that one way to push Eversource was to take away some of their income source. We have legislation that allows towns and counties in New Hampshire to produce or purchase their own energy – their “Community Choice Aggregation”, or as we prefer to call it, community power. Instead of Eversource buying energy from a market we have no agency over and mostly based on fossil fuel sources, towns and counties can buy the energy for their residents without having wealthy shareholders to answer to. And what’s best: this not only allows people to have more decision-making power for choosing clean renewable energy, it also lowers the bills!
Our Community Power campaign has already shown that local and affordable renewable energy is possible. About 30% of the state has already committed to it: we already have 65 towns and one county with community power in New Hampshire, and we plan to keep expanding that number! We will have town votes in March 2025, and we have been very busy organizing info sessions about what community power means, the benefits of it and how to make it happen. Our goal is to have at least 10 more towns on board with renewable community power by March, and present to at least 30 groups to get them moving towards community power.
Community Power has the potential to be a big breakthrough for energy justice in the United States and, especially now, but we need your help!
We cannot accept any steps backwards. Together, we can turn the fight for local, clean and affordable energy into an unstoppable wave of change!
