Transforming New Hampshire: from coal to solar power

We drove north into New Hampshire on a warm morning. It was a return to familiar territory. I'd lived in Central New Hampshire for over thirty years.

Starting on my farm in nearby West Lebanon, Maine, my life was an unanticipated forty year journey and sometimes adventure. I began as back-to-the-lander and writer from New York City in the early 1970s, and then found myself as non-violent anti-nuclear activist with the Clamshell Alliance, immersed in energy issues and opposition to the Seabrook nuclear project. This led to work, starting in the 1980s, first as energy auditor, then energy consultant, cooperative organizer, Sustainability Director of SNHU and then as solar energy developer, all paralleling my efforts as writer and social theorist.

N.H. still feels like home, a place that shaped my adult consciousness. And it is in a journey to New Hampshire that I found in microcosm a good model for our global dilemma, for business and pollution as usual that kept us on the fossil fuel path toward self-destruction. This is the path that not only allows pollution for free, but also the ongoing distortion of free markets to maintain the profits and prerogatives of polluters.

And in 2024, to my surprise, Granite Shore Power, the owners of Merrimack Station coal plant in Bow , and the Schiller Station in Portsmouth announced they will become solar and battery storage renewable sites. Schiller will shut down coal generation by 2025, Merrimack by 2028 as part of an agreement with the Conservation Law Foundation and the Sierra Club..

Merrimack Station on the banks of the Merrimack River is New England’s last operating coal plant. It was NH’s largest point source of green house gas pollution. Merrimack Station was the only place in NH that I could kayak all winter. South of the plant hot water from the Bow plant generators poured into the river melting the ice and allowed me to paddle amidst the stream of ice flows. As long as I looked down river with the plant behind you the river was beautiful.

In recent years Merrimack Station ran only as a peaking plant to respond at premium prices to peak summer and winter electric loads. Coal was no longer able to compete with renewables as a base load plant for the New England grid.

New Hampshire is a good place to help open our eyes, and realize that what seems intractably difficult may not be all that hard if enough of us decide that enough is enough.

A drive along the Merrimack River

Decades of conflict in New Hampshire over energy and the environment were driven not by issues of technical design, but by matters in the realm of politics, finance, business profits, health ,and ecological consequences. Events were largely shaped by the market rules and politics supporting business and pollution as usual. These allowed pollution for free and the shifting of costs to those downwind and to future generations, that, in turn, defined our commonsense, and what was considered economic, good business, and acceptable risk. Understanding and untangling these threads and how they interacted will help inform the road ahead toward a sustainable future.

Driving north from Massachusetts into New Hampshire at the Hooksett rest stop, a white column of smoke pours from the stack of Merrimack Station, the 459 megawatt coal fired Bow, NH power plant. Until some years ago, when an expensive new scrubber system was installed by state mandate, the exhaust had a distinctive brownish hue as particulates poured into the air and then rained down along the Merrimack Valley that had become an asthma hot spot. Merrimack Station has two boilers. The first built in 1960 had 114 megawatts when there was little thought of the coming transformation of Southern New Hampshire. The second boiler was completed in 1968 of 346 MW. Megawatts.

Merrimack Station had always been about cheaper and reliable electricity from coal. Its pollution and its consequences apparently an acceptable result of doing business. It was part of the “New Hampshire advantage” that attracted businesses and migrants with comparatively lower costs from Massachusetts just south of the border.

Southern New Hampshire was transformed in the last third of the 20th century from a mosaic of sleepy country towns, best know for rural icons like the venerable Robert Frost farm in Derry. Almost over night, it seemed, the Merrimack Valley and much of Southern New Hampshire became one of the fastest growing regions of the country. Farms were almost as scarce as hen's teeth, and new business and industry and subdivisions sprouted like mushrooms.

Electricity demand soared with runaway growth, and the Bow plant became the reliable base of Public Service Company of NH electricity supply, with coal delivered by rail or by barge on the Merrimack. Rising electric demand convinced Public Service to think big and transform itself, as well, by becoming lead owner, with a 35.7% share, of the Seabrook two reactor, 2300 megawatt nuclear project, at the time, the nation's largest. Seabrook Station and its opponents would become a consuming focus for Public Service Company of NH.

Public Service was just big enough to support the financial weight of a then less then 2 billion dollar nuclear project. But almost nothing went right. A chain of unanticipated events unfolded, including, as the Seabrook project was in its earliest stages, what seemed at the time to be barely relevant was opposition by local residents.

Citizen resistance in the NH Seacoast had stopped a planned Aristotle Onassis NH oil refinery in Durham, with crude unloading planned for the rich town of Rye, not far from the poor town of Seabrook. And while the Seabrook struggle raged, in the 1970s and 80s, Merrimack Station receded from public attention as the Seabrook nuclear issue and its consequences transformed Public Service and had national consequences, and a global resonance helping shape the future of nuclear power and utilities.

Public Service plan was for first reactors to come on line in 1979 and the second in 1982. One Seabrook reactor finally came on line in 1990 after decades of citizen resistance and many thousands of arrests of non-violent activists. The financial collapse of Public Service Company in endless pursuit of their nuclear dreams led to its bankrupcy and purchase by Eversource as a NH subsidiary. Nuclear power remains economic today only on the basis of endless government subsidies and punishing utility rates.

The latest pursuit of new small reactors , like the 2024 cancelation of the 77 MW NuScale reactor project in Utah is more of the same. The market confirms the failure of nuclear projects to be able to compete with renewables with zero fuel costs and zero toxic nuclear waste and zero nuclear weapons and terrorism issues.

The central nuclear problem economically is inability to control costs combined with the high the fixed costs of smaller reactors. Unsurprisingly this led to even greater costs and complexity. The economics are clear. Absent endless government subsidies new reactors cannot compete.

An ecological growth strategy

An ecological growth strategy is based on applying our democracy, our markets, and our entrepreneurial energy in a fashion that lets economic growth mean ecological improvement. It uses the very core of our market economy, the incentives of the price system, guided by and new market rules and ecological taxation, as the primary tools to get this done.

To be clear, an ecological growth strategy is the best path to increased and sustainable earning per share (EPS), a metric near and dear to the hearts of both prudent investors and sharp speculators. Business and pollution as usual is the path to destruction and economic collapse. The aggressive pursuit of sustainability means , not only an ecological future, but also sustainable profits and increased income for all. It's a plan for sustainable global economic growth and an end to poverty. That's the value proposition.

An ecological growth strategy, its policies, programs and dynamics,will inform ecological growth as an expression of the co- evolutionary forces of sustainability. A wide range of economic policies, technical measures, new markets rules, ecological taxation and market price signals will also enter the political thicket.

Limitation and contraction or degrowth as an alternative is a post-modern variation of Lincoln Stefffens' less than prescient remark about the depression era Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works”. Degrowth is a strategy to do less with less, and to divide a smaller pie.

What is needed instead is radical reduction of pollution, depletion and ecological damage. What is of primary concern are ecological consequences not material output separated from consequences. For example a global transformation to renewable resources from fossil fuels will be of enormous ecological and social benefit. That should be job one. The basis of ecological economic growth is the elimination of ecological damage in the context of social and economic justice.

The same standards for minimizing pollution, depletion and ecological damage must be applied to all aspects of the economy from agriculture to forestry to industry. Some solar and wind projects that are not sound should not be built. Our job is to optimize the ecological, economic, and social benefits of pollution minimization.

Next steps

An ecological growth strategy will include a global series of transformative technological changes such as he adoption of continental scale efficient renewable energy systems ranging from local micro-grids to transcontinental super-grids.

In embracing an ecological growth strategy, we are not removing the profit motive, nor abolishing capitalism as necessary steps in order to create a sustainable world. For example, mass displacement of the 40 gigatons (billion tons) of fossil fuel carbon dioxide equivalent emissions generation is valued by the U.S. EPA and the NationalAcademy of Sciences as $190 per metric ton of the social costs (ecological and social consequences) from fossil fuel emissions to $230 a ton in 2030.

Displacing one gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions means a value of $190 billion dollars. 40 gigatons means 7.6 trillion of potential savings. These trillions in real value can be monetized through a regulatory tool such as Sustainability Credits (SCs)valued at $190 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. SCs can be turned to cash on the books of banks as paid in capital and as cash to be used for future sustainable investments to reduce green house gas emissions.

The ordinary magic of banks means $10 of investment for each dollar of bank capital. Therefore the yearly potential for global replacement of fossil fuels with renewables 1.9 trillion dollars for each gigaton of carbon displaced by renewables and a total of $76 trillion for displacing all carbon emissions yearly.

It is of central importance to value and monetize ecological sustainability. This represents an enormous increase in ecological wealth and reduction of pollution. It is a far more desirable path than a carbon tax.

Displacing carbon dioxide emissions by renewable energy represents a dramatic and essential reduction of polluting externalities and makes profit and ecological economic growth a clear expression of making economic growth express ecological improvement.

The pursuit of an ecological future: basic imperatives

The democratic market system when faced with gathering ecological catastrophe will respond vigorously, and by necessity, practice the requisite mixture of limitation, restraint, and focused expansion for economic growth leading to ecological improvement and construction of the material basis of a sustainable civilization.

An ecological growth strategy is designed to respond to the gravity of the global ecological crisis in a swift and timely fashion before our options are foreclosed by irreversible consequences. It is crucial for us to understand that continuing to subject the ecosphere to unremitting pollution and habitat destruction will lead to dramatic and non-linear change as the ecosphere, responding to changes on a geologic and planetary scale, finds a new equilibrium, one that is decidedly unfriendly to human civilization. It’s time to embrace and to pursue an ecological growth future.