by David Brooks | Feb 14, 2024 | Blog, Newsletter
Merrimack Station in Bow, NH, is New England’s last coal-fired power plant. It will operate as a peaker plant through at least 2026, when it stops getting automatic capacity payments from the regional grid. I assume it will shut soon after for financial reasons,...
by David Brooks | Feb 13, 2024 | Blog, Newsletter
From a short article in Northern Woodlands: The average hurricane downs 5 to 10 percent of aboveground forest carbon across the region, but modeled future increases in hurricane strength increase this percentage, even unprecedently inland and northward into Vermont...
by David Brooks | Feb 13, 2024 | Blog, Newsletter
You have probably heard the phrase “data is not the plural of anecdote,” meaning that evidence which has been gathered systematically is far more valuable than a collection of individual stories. I certainly have heard it, and I have used it myself, but I didn’t...
by David Brooks | Feb 13, 2024 | Blog, Newsletter
A new paper from two Dartmouth researchers looked at snowpack records in March over the 1981–2020 period in 169 major Northern Hemisphere river basins and found a disturbing trend: We show a generalizable and highly nonlinear temperature sensitivity of snowpack, in...
by David Brooks | Feb 13, 2024 | Blog, Newsletter
The Burgess Power Plant in Berlin, which has been at the center of a long debate over whether New Hampshire should subsidize plants that burn wood to produce power, has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy because it says Eversource isn’t paying it for power. It says...
by David Brooks | Feb 12, 2024 | Blog, Newsletter
ISO-New England, the folks who run the six-state power grid, have announced results for the latest capacity auction, which bribes – er, sorry, pays power plants a fixed amount regardless of their output. the system is designed to make sure there will be enough...