Six decades after it began, coal-fired electricity is officially gone from New England following the shut-down of Merrimack Station in Bow, the region’s last power plant of its kind.
Merrimack Station, which started in 1960 during a wave of new coal-fired electricity in the Northeast, ceased producing power this summer after a long rundown that saw it running only a few weeks each year recently.
Most of the staff, both unionized and non-unionized, have been transferred to other units owned by Granite Shore Power or been laid off, said Granite Shore Power President Jim Andrews, and the complicated process of shutting down a large industrial facility is ongoing.
“We’re in the process of … deactivating the station; draining, securing it,” said Andrews.
Although the news was expected, it won’t be celebrated in the town of Bow, which depends on the station for a hefty chunk of its property tax revenue. It is unclear what the final closure will do to the site’s valuation.
The two units built at the site on the banks of the Merrimack River, one opened in 1960 and one in 1968, burned bituminous coal with a total output of 460 megawatts, enough to power several hundred thousand homes. They were scheduled to shut by 2028 but this year it stopped being eligible for extra payments from what is known as the capacity market, making them a financial drain on the private Granite Shore Power. Like many older power plants, their operating costs are too high for them to compete simply by selling electricity day to day.
Over the past two years, the plant had seldom run, producing power only during times of peak demand, such as hot summer days.
Two smaller power units at Merrimack Station, 17-megawatt turbines that burn kerosene, will continue to operate as what is known as a peaker plant. They can turn on and off very quickly and serve to buffer emergency shortfalls of electricity during times of peak demand. They are still eligible for capacity-market payments.
Andrews said Granite Shore Power hopes to go forward with its ambitious plan for Bow and a long-closed sister coal plant in Portsmouth called Schiller Station. The company has said it wants to put a large bank of batteries at Schiller to be operated as a peaker plant, and to install a large solar array as well as utility-scale batteries at Merrimack Station, which sits on 343 acres of largely open land. You can see more details in this 2024 article.
“We continue to consider all opportunities for redevelopment at Merrimack,” the company said in a statement.
Both sites are valuable even without power plants because of their connections to the existing power grid and to commercial rail lines, which were used to haul coal to the site.
The shutdown at Merrimack Station is unsurprising since it has been inevitable for years due to financial reasons, not just because of concerns about pollution. But little is certain about energy these days due to President Trump’s administration, which has taken action to halt the closing of other coal-fired plants in the country.
As recently as the early 1990s, one-sixth of New England’s electricity came from burning coal. The last coal plant outside New Hampshire, Bridgeport Harbor in Connecticut, closed two years ago. New York state has also closed all its coal power plants.
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