As development takes off, Lakes Region asks for pipeline expansion

A sign welcomes visitors to the historic village of downtown Tilton. Development has picked up in the town in recent years, said Land Use Coordinator Pam Consentino. Now, worried that a pause on new gas connections may dampen growth, officials are seeking a pipeline expansion that the utility says may take years and millions of dollars. (Photo by Molly Rains/New Hampshire Bulletin)

When New Hampshire called for more housing, the Lakes Region answered, and development in several central cities and towns took off fast. Then, the gas ran out.

New natural gas connections in several municipalities throughout the region are paused, according to officials and developers. Liberty Utilities, the regulated company that serves as the region’s gas supplier, says it lacks the capacity to add more customers without upgrades that could take years, and millions of dollars, to realize. 

Local officials said the situation was an unexpected roadblock that threatened development they had worked hard to court under the assumption that gas service would be available to new homes and businesses.

“We found out the hard way,” said Pat Consentino, a member of the Tilton Select Board for nearly two decades and the town’s current land use coordinator. Within the last year, she said, plans for nearly 400 residences had been approved in the town. “We have a tremendous amount of development going on right now … but people, the developers, are going to the utilities and not getting gas.”

Municipalities in the lakes region including Franklin, Gilford, Laconia, Northfield, and Tilton are facing a pause on new connections, according to David Chunn, planning and zoning director for the city of Franklin. A spokesperson for Liberty declined to clarify which municipalities were affected when asked via email Jan. 6. However, at a meeting of the Tilton Select Board on Dec. 4, Liberty engineer Ian Crabtree said demand in the area was at the upper limit of what the company could supply with existing infrastructure.

The line that supplies the Lakes Region was originally constructed in the 1960s. Shortly after, the area’s population grew rapidly throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Crabtree said. In the early 2000s, anticipating a capacity shortfall, the company began widening the line, but the project was never completed. Today, a stretch of about 10 miles of the original six-inch line remains.

Liberty’s preferred next step would be widening that stretch to a modern 12-inch line, Crabtree said, but that would be a “huge undertaking.” Representatives at the meeting estimated it could take upwards of five to seven years to complete the work.

Where gas network does exist, access is not guaranteed

Natural gas service is somewhat uncommon in New Hampshire. About 1 in 5 households uses the fuel for home heating, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. 

That’s because most of the state lacks natural gas infrastructure, said Don Kreis, New Hampshire’s consumer advocate. But the municipalities saying they’ve been hit with a moratorium do have access, falling within Liberty’s “franchise area,” or the region in which the utility can operate. The capacity shortfall, then, means the utility has “customers it can’t serve,” Kreis said.

It wasn’t the lack of gas that was the biggest problem in Franklin, Chunn said, but rather the lack of warning.

“The lack of capacity is a bummer, understandably,” he said. “My irritation is that it was allowed to get to this point, and it was known about many, many years in advance, and no notice was shared with anyone, as far as municipalities. … Many of us only learned about this through people coming to tell us about it, homeowners and property developers, as they encountered the issue. It would have been nice to know about this in advance, from the state regulators.”

Kreis said planning to ensure a utility can meet customer demand was the responsibility of the utility, not the state.

“It’s convenient to blame the government for having failed to plan, but it’s the utility’s job to plan and execute,” he said. 

And planning and executing a project as extensive as a pipeline expansion to the Lakes Region, he added, would be a significant investment.

“Liberty is a cash-strapped company. … They have limited capital resources, and they’re only willing to spend so much building facilities like pipelines.”

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A tentative step toward expansion

In a Jan. 7 email, Liberty Utilities spokesperson Pamela Bellings said the company had begun the “design and engineering” phase for the next upgrade project, though she did not specify what that would entail.

Engineering, design, and permitting alone would likely take years, Crabtree said at the Dec. 4 meeting.

Liberty lawyer Mike Sheehan added then that simply planning the project was not the only hurdle. Another “limiting factor,” he said, would be whether such growth would be considered justified.

The cost of projects undertaken by utilities is distributed across all ratepayers in a system. In deciding whether to incur the cost of this project — which would affect rates for customers across the state, not just in the Lakes Region — the Public Utilities Commission and Liberty would have to consider whether such an investment is justified, Sheehan said. 

“That’s always the push-pull we have,” he said. 

During the meeting, Crabtree estimated such a project would cost in the “tens of millions.”

Assessing options

Though the project would take years, local officials said they still believed it was important. Rob Mora, planning director for the city of Laconia, said that without more gas, the Lakes Region lacked the infrastructure to support the state’s goal of boosting the housing supply.

Mora said he worried higher costs of alternative fuels would raise local development out of the reach of those who need it most. 

“Especially if you’re trying to build larger-scale, you know, residential development, that’s really going to be for that ‘missing middle’ income bracket or that workforce development, those are going to be the people that are affected most by this, and those developments that are supporting those people,” he said. 

Mora pointed to the planned development of about 2,000 homes and adjacent commercial spaces at the site of the former Laconia State School, and said he worried costs would increase for future residents without natural gas. 

But as fully electrified development becomes more common, disregarding alternatives to gas heating might be a missed opportunity, said Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire. 

Given the long time frame for gas expansion, adapting both residential and industrial development plans to electricity instead of gas could be both faster and cost effective if done right, he said. 

“I would encourage them to get a lot more creative than just thinking, hey, how do we pressure Liberty to build more natural gas? Because even if that’s the solution they want, it’s going to take years, and I do think there’s been an enormous amount of innovation on the industrial electrification side of things.”

Electricity is expensive in New Hampshire, Evans-Brown said. But investing in a more efficient building envelope and heat pumps can bring down the cost, making an electrified building more feasible. 

New Hampshire’s first net-zero multifamily building was constructed in West Lebanon in 2019, with 29 units of housing for low-income individuals and families — all climate-controlled with electric heat pumps. 

“I disagree with the assessment that gas is the only way,” Evans-Brown said.