New Hampshire solar rebates and incentives: 2024 guide

New Hampshire isn’t the sunniest state in the U.S. But the high electricity prices make it a great state for going solar. While there aren’t many state-level incentives, the federal solar tax credit and the state’s net metering program can still save you thousands on your solar panel system.

As a New Hampshire homeowner, the federal solar tax credit, formerly known as the ITC, is the most impactful way to reduce your solar costs.

Residential Clean Energy Credit

The Residential Clean Energy Credit, formerly known as the federal investment tax credit (ITC), can reduce your solar panel system's cost by 30%. Your entire system qualifies for this incentive, including equipment, labor, permitting, and sales tax. 

You also need a high enough tax bill, though you can roll over any remaining credit year-to-year until 2035 when the ITC expires. The only time you might be eligible for a direct payment for the ITC is if you're a tax-exempt entity, like a nonprofit organization.

In addition to the great rebates and incentives above, New Hampshire offers a solar property tax exemption. Solar panels generally raise a home's property value, but if your city or town adopts this law, you won’t have to pay extra tax on that added value.

If you connect your solar panel system to the grid, you can benefit from a solar buyback program known as net metering—arguably the best solar incentive of them all.

With net metering, your utility company works like a bank for solar power. If you make more solar power than your home can use at any given time, you can send that excess electricity back to the grid, and your utility company gives you an energy credit. When the sun isn't shining and you need to pull electricity from the grid, your utility draws against those credits. 

Depending on the weather, your energy use, and your solar setup, net metering makes it so you will owe very little, or even nothing, on your electric bill with solar panels.

There are a few nuances to keep in mind about New Hampshire's current version of net metering.

• Credits can be carried forward indefinitely. At the end of every monthly billing cycle, if you’ve exported more solar power to the grid than you’ve used at home, you can keep your excess credits to cover future energy use. This allows you to save all those kWh produced in the sunnier months and apply them in the winter when your panels don’t produce as much electricity.

• Carried-forward credits lose some of their value. These credits are worth about 25% less than the retail rate of electricity. They’re carried forward as kWh-based energy credits, so the accounting gets a little wonky, and you’ll always be on the hook to pay your monthly meter fee in cash.

• New Hampshire is reconsidering their net metering rules. We’re not sure what this updated policy will look like. But based on California’s NEM 3.0 policy, it’s unlikely to be better for consumers than the current program. If you go solar before those changes, you’ll be grandfathered into the old plan for many years. (And in the unlikely event that the new net metering rules end up being more favorable than the current ones, there will likely be a few ways to switch.)

Learn more about these net metering programs:

New Hampshire also offers some great battery incentive programs to bring down the price of energy storage. For starters, all batteries above 3 kWh are also eligible for the 30% federal tax credit. The state’s solar property tax exemption applies to energy storage systems, too. 

The Connected Solutions Program is a demand response program that compensates you for allowing Eversource to access your battery during times of peak energy demand. From June through September, your battery may be called between 3:00 PM and 8:00 PM, but no more than 60 times per summer and for no longer than 3 hours per event. In exchange for your stored electricity, you’ll earn $230 per kWh, up to $3,000. This program requires you to participate in demand response events for a minimum of three years. 

Solar batteries paired with solar panels can boost your energy independence and provide backup power during an outage. New Hampshire’s net metering program is pretty good, but installing a battery helps you keep more of your own (free) solar power rather than letting the utility company take it at a discount.

If you're looking for solar installers in New Hampshire, here are some popular suggestions: