New England no longer burns coal for electricity. The permanent closure of Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire — the region’s last coal-fired power plant — makes New England the largest coal-free electricity market in the United States. The 480-megawatt facility shut down commercial operations on September 12th, the result of a settlement agreement between plant owner Granite Shore Power and environmental groups, nearly a year and a half ahead of its original 2028 retirement deadline.
At a glance
- Coal-free New England: Merrimack Station’s permanent closure makes the six-state region the first major U.S. regional grid to operate entirely without coal-fired generation.
- Plant capacity: The Bow, N.H., facility had a generating capacity of 480 megawatts and was the single largest source of coal emissions in New England for years before its retirement.
- Advocacy timeline: Environmental groups including the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign filed legal challenges and ran sustained public pressure campaigns spanning more than a decade to accelerate the plant’s closure.
What coal pollution actually costs
Coal combustion releases sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter — pollutants directly linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. The communities closest to Merrimack Station bore a disproportionate share of that burden.
Residents near coal plants nationwide face higher rates of childhood asthma and lower air quality than surrounding areas, a pattern the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has documented for decades. Removing a plant of this scale from operation will reduce harmful emissions across the broader airshed — a benefit that should show up in hospital admission rates, missed school days, and healthcare costs over the years ahead.
That improvement won’t arrive equally everywhere. Frontline communities near the plant may see faster gains than areas farther away, and the transition away from fossil fuel employment creates real economic pressures for workers and host towns that deserve serious policy attention. Bow, New Hampshire, faces the loss of property tax revenue and local jobs the plant provided for generations.
How the grid held together
Retiring a 480-megawatt plant is not a small ask of a regional grid. New England’s grid operator, ISO-NE, managed the transition without disruption — evidence that years of investment in natural gas, wind, and solar capacity created enough headroom to absorb the loss.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s regional electricity data shows that New England’s generation mix has shifted dramatically over the past 15 years. Coal once supplied a meaningful share of the region’s power. Today, offshore wind projects under development in the Gulf of Maine and along the southern New England coast are positioned to fill the remaining gap as older fossil fuel assets retire.
The closure doesn’t end the region’s dependence on fossil fuels entirely. Natural gas still supplies a large portion of New England’s electricity, particularly in winter. That’s the unfinished chapter the region now turns toward.
The advocacy that made it happen
Closure dates don’t arrive on their own. The shutdown of Merrimack Station followed sustained legal and public pressure from organizations including the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign and local New Hampshire environmental groups. Advocates challenged the plant’s air permits, organized community hearings, and built a public record that made continued operation increasingly difficult to defend on economic and health grounds.
That kind of multi-decade organizing is easy to overlook when a closure is finally announced. But the Merrimack campaign offers a replicable model: combine legal intervention, public health documentation, and economic analysis to demonstrate that an aging fossil fuel asset is no longer viable. The Natural Resources Defense Council has tracked how this approach has worked across coal retirements nationwide.
The economics have also shifted decisively. Lazard’s annual energy cost analysis shows that new wind and solar generation is now cheaper than operating most existing coal plants — a reversal that would have seemed unlikely two decades ago. Coal plants also struggle to ramp output up and down quickly in response to variable renewable generation, putting them at a structural disadvantage on modern grids.
What comes next
The closure of Merrimack Station opens grid space and political bandwidth for what follows. Offshore wind development off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts is already underway. Battery storage capacity is expanding. States across the region have set binding clean electricity standards that require further fossil fuel retirements in the years ahead.
New England now joins a growing list of regions moving coal off the grid entirely. The International Energy Agency reports that renewable capacity additions worldwide broke records in 2023 — context that puts regional milestones like this one in a broader arc of change.
The basic fact is durable: a regional grid that once depended on coal no longer does. Progress on air quality, on climate targets, and on grid modernization doesn’t reverse when a single plant closes — it compounds.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Hacker News discussion — New England becomes coal-free
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
- The Good News for Humankind archive on clean energy
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