By Carol Britton Meyer

For the sixth year in a row, Hull Municipal Light Plant will rent generators to provide electricity to the town should a major National Grid power outage occur this winter.

The light board approved renting them again for the 2025-26 season on a 4-1 vote on Thursday, with Chair Thomas Burns voting against.

“The generators will have cost $4 million” counting the upcoming season, “and they’ve only been used for a little more than three hours,” Burns told The Hull Times in a follow-up telephone interview. “[Theoretically], we could have bought generators for customers’ own use with that kind of money.”

The generators will be set to go in the event of an emergency from December 1 through March 31 at a cost of about $824,000 for the coming season.

HMLP customers were recently asked to fill out a survey to gauge their interest in continued use of wintertime generators as a backup. The results – including 75% support for renting generators again this winter – were considered in the light board’s decision. About 20% of ratepayers responded.

The survey also indicated that 600 of HMLP’s 5,858 residential customers have their own generators.

The placement of rented back-up generators in trailers at the Department of Conservation and Recreation lot near the traffic lights on George Washington Boulevard remains a year-by-year decision by the light board.

National Grid-related power losses are often of long duration and are more difficult to resolve than ones that fall under the purview of Hull’s light plant because the feeder lines are located in a wooded area in Hingham that can be difficult to access, especially at night.

Temporary generators have been rented for the past several years following numerous National Grid outages. However, during the years they have been installed, they have only been needed for a total of three-and-a-half hours, at an annual cost of $114 to the average homeowner paying the $9.52-a-month surcharge. The new residential surcharge will be $10.43 for the 2025-26 season.

“This is the first increase since we first started renting the generators,” Burns said.

Revenue from generator surcharges to residential and other customers, including municipal, will cover the cost of renting the generators. The total number of customers served by HMLP is 6,256.

Generator costs include onsite technician time for setup, startup, and breakdown; rental of the six units; roundtrip trucking to Hull from Milton and 1,200 gallons of fuel for each generator, among other expenses.

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