Eversource exits water and wind to become pure-play grid utility

New England's largest energy network sheds offshore wind liabilities and water assets as grid transmission demand reshapes US utility strategy.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Mon, 3 August 2026

Green and black rugged cases rest on a white laboratory table, illuminated by bright window light, with blurred computer components visible in the background.

Eversource Energy, which operates New England's largest energy delivery network serving more than four million customers across Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, reported a sharp fall in second-quarter GAAP earnings to $53.7 million (or $0.14 per share) from $352.7 million a year earlier. Strip out two large one-off charges, however, and a different strategic picture emerges: a utility deliberately shedding non-core assets to focus on the transmission and distribution infrastructure that the energy transition increasingly demands.

The headline GAAP number was dragged down by a $164 million after-tax charge tied to an increase in contingent liabilities from the September 2024 sale of the South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind offshore wind projects, and a further $111.4 million after-tax write-down related to the June 2026 sale of its Aquarion Water subsidiary. On a non-GAAP recurring basis, which management considers the better measure of underlying performance, second-quarter earnings reached $329.1 million, or $0.87 per share, with the company reaffirming full-year non-GAAP guidance of $4.57 to $4.72 per share and a long-term earnings-per-share growth target of five to seven per cent through 2030.

Retreat from wind, focus on the wire

The strategic logic is deliberate. Eversource has now fully exited offshore wind after a costly misadventure: the Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind sales generated ongoing price-adjustment obligations to Global Infrastructure Partners that continue to erode GAAP results. The Aquarion Water divestiture, meanwhile, returns Eversource to a singular focus on electricity and gas delivery, allowing capital to be concentrated on the transmission assets that regulators and grid operators are prioritising as renewable generation scales.

That pivot is already paying dividends in pipeline terms. Eversource disclosed it has been preliminarily selected by ISO-NE, the independent system operator for New England, to develop critical transmission infrastructure connecting northern Maine generation capacity to the southern New England load centres. The project reflects a national pattern: as offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage multiply at the grid edge, the investment bottleneck is increasingly in the high-voltage wires that move power from where it is generated to where it is consumed. For Eversource, transmission earned $183.7 million in the quarter (adjusting for the FERC rate-of-return refund charge), while electric distribution added $170.4 million, a year-on-year improvement driven by base-rate increases in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Convergence angle: the regulated grid as AI-era infrastructure

For cross-sector investors, the Eversource story sits inside a broader capital reallocation thesis. The explosion in data centre demand across New England and the mid-Atlantic, driven substantially by AI compute buildout, is placing fresh strain on transmission capacity that was designed for a pre-hyperscaler era. Regulated utilities with existing rights-of-way, state approvals, and ISO relationships are, in this environment, de facto infrastructure gatekeepers for the AI economy. A utility that has cleaned up its balance sheet, exited speculative offshore wind positions, and won a major ISO-NE transmission mandate is precisely the type of asset that infrastructure-focused sovereign wealth and pension capital has been seeking as a stable, regulated complement to higher-risk AI infrastructure bets.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's March 2026 decision reducing the allowed return on equity for New England transmission owners from 10.57 per cent to 9.57 per cent introduces a near-term earnings headwind; the FERC ROE refund charge cost Eversource $43.9 million after tax in the first half. Yet Eversource's own guidance implies it expects earnings growth to trend towards the upper half of its five-to-seven per cent long-term range by 2028, suggesting management sees transmission volume growth outpacing the rate-cut drag over the medium term. The question for macro investors is whether US regulators will continue to cap returns on transmission just as the strategic value of that infrastructure reaches a generational high.