New England's last coal plant has stopped operating, according to its owners
42 comments
·October 15, 20253eb7988a1663
fsckboy
>Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is a political move, this is quite likely just economics.
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is likely economics, RTFA at least a few paragraphs:
Granite Shore Power, the company that owns the coal plant in Bow, New Hampshire, said they ceased commercial operations September 12th, about a year and a half since they announced they would retire their facility by 2028 as part of a settlement agreement with environmental groups.
kstenerud
It's going to be a mix of both. If it were massively profitable, they'd just pay up whatever they need to, get whatever influential politicians on their side, do a bunch of marketing, and then continue operations.
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not2b
Yes, natural gas is now cheaper than coal for power generation, and solar has become much cheaper. Even disregarding environmental concerns, it's just not a good choice any more.
ericd
I'm curious, in case anyone knows, how much of the economic disadvantage of coal is because of environmental reg compliance versus other, more fundamental costs?
chris_va
(disclaimer that I manage a climate&energy research group)
Most of the comments here are speculative.
The TLDR is that coal plants have trouble ramping their production up/down quickly, unlike natural gas which can do so in minutes. So, if you have a grid that is being thrashed by variable production (renewables), this results in variable pricing and demand for baseload. Coal cannot economically compete in that market (and neither can nuclear, which has the same problem).
pragmatic
You can't put coal in a pipeline.
You have to physically handle every piece of coal. Extract, load ship, unload.
Natural gas is shooting out of the ground in North Dakota.
You can compare to wind and solar also.
The economics aren't favorable.
thelastgallon
Thats the wrong question. The question to ask is what is the death rates per unit of electricity production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Coal beats everything else by a mile. We also get mercury pollution for free, so no more eating fish.
xbmcuser
Coal requires manual labour and mining so even without environmental regulations it's expensive. In the US coal use decrease had very little to do with environmental factors most of it was because fracking brought in cheap natural gas and pushed coal out.
LarsAlereon
I think it's primarily a fundamental cost issue. It's simply far cheaper to get an equivalent amount of energy from fracking a natural gas formation than having to literally dig coal out of the ground.
eru
Well, if you want to answer that question, you probably also need to figure out the hypothetical cost of the other power sources minus environmental regulations.
Nuclear would be (and used to be) massively cheaper, before regulations went wild against it.
I'm deliberately saying 'went wild', because the earlier nuclear power generation that was built to saner standards also has turned out to be incredibly safe already.
(Basically, anyone who avoided insane Soviet bullshit had safe nuclear power, as measured in eg fatalities per Joule of electricity generated.)
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monero-xmr
https://www.eia.gov/dashboard/newengland/overview
Solar makes up 4% of New England electricity. Not much sun there. Needs nuclear to succeed
toomuchtodo
Unlikely. The ISO has 3.5GW of solar and nuclear capacity equally (I’m aware of capacity factor of solar vs nuclear, but the ISO also reports ~6GW of behind the meter distributed solar which only manifests as reduced demand). The ISO needs more batteries, renewables, and transmission from hydro in Quebec, Canada (1.2GW), but nuclear is not needed to succeed long term and those two generators will eventually be decommissioned, as their license only extends their operating period to ~2050. Twenty five years is plenty of time to replace their 3.5GW of output; 18GW of battery storage, 17GW of wind, and 13.5GW of solar is in the ISO’s interconnect queue or has been proposed by developers.
https://www.mainepublic.org/climate/2025-01-03/central-maine... (“Central Maine Power aims to finish controversial western Maine power corridor in 2025”)
https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2023-11-30/documents-re... (NextEra, which owns the Seabrook nuclear power plant in N.H., stands to lose tens of millions of dollars every year if the NECEC comes online and attempted to use political donations to scuttle the Quebec Hydro transmission line)
https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne... (“The new transmission line between Quebec and Maine will provide 1,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydroelectric power to the New England power grid in Lewiston, Maine, sufficient to meet the demand of 1.2 million homes. Once built, NECEC will be New England's largest renewable energy source, saving customers $190 million per year.”)
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/government-industry-affairs/new...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-NE-ISNE/live/fif...
(Quebec, interestingly, has ~40GW of hydro generation capacity)
rat87
its an economic move but it would be good not bad if it were a political move coal is bad and we should be moving away from it faster
juliankauai
Trump just closed the already approved largest solar power project in the US. That’s political. I’m all for fusion but we need power now for the transition. Losing the solar project for 3 million people is a big loss. it takes a long time to get any type of big power up to speed.
cwal37
Second US organized market to do so, and third in the region, after NY(ISO) and Ontario (IESO).
With HQ there as well, it’s actually quite a large coal-free chunk of grid.
What will be interesting is the extent to which offshore wind and imports from HQ will be able to materialize according to plan. OSW is having a hatchet being taken to it in the US currently, and imports from HQ into NY and NE have been way down recently while big new lines are also built.
Not exactly in the ISO forecasts, but very much supported by state policy has been the rapid expansion of behind the meter solar in New England. Really taken the edge off of summer days in particular, although also susceptible to smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Not the most exciting markets day-to-day, but interesting long-term things happening.
bobthepanda
For those who have trouble parsing this HQ is HydroQuebec.
thehappypm
There actually is some coal in New England, and if there was (for some reason) a desire for New England to be energy independent, coal might be part of the mix as a result. This article discusses some less-successful attempts to get into that coal.. and it’s delightful to see the date of its publication.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/massachusetts-coa...
fujigawa
Overall this isn't the W you think it is; New England still leads the nation in heating oil consumption by a large margin.
Nearly 2M households in New England heat their homes with oil (usually boiler, sometimes furnace). For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar, which literally gets burned like a flamethrower to boil water to heat your home. It's dirty but keeps your home toasty warm when it's -20 outside.
Maine in particular has very little natural gas infrastructure. Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.
gbear605
Electric is extremely practical - I know a lot of New Englanders who have replaced oil burners with heat pumps and made back the investment quite quickly and warmly (it’s easy when a fill up of oil can cost close to a thousand dollars, and you will probably need two in a winter). Insulation helps a lot of course, but the main difficulty is just the upfront cost, time, and structural issues with houses that don’t have central air.
toomuchtodo
Heat pumps (they work down to -10F, and can be supplemented with fossil or wood heating, if needed).
https://www.nhpr.org/new-england-news/2024-07-24/new-england...
https://portal.ct.gov/deep/energy/new-england-heat-pump-acce...
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zackkatz
Unfortunately (and unbelievably!), Massachusetts still burns trash.
> There are more than 100 municipal waste combustion facilities in operation across the United States. Five of these are located in Massachusetts.
jcranmer
What's wrong with burning trash? It means there's much less material to send to landfills, plus it's one of the most economical ways to recycle metal from household waste streams.
kccqzy
California will also soon stop using coal. Currently there's just one coal generating station left, in Utah.
toomuchtodo
California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45567645 - October 2025
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ChrisArchitect
Meanwhile, just last week:
Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
deepnotderp
Yay for fracking!
Yay for natural gas!
Before anyone jumps the gun and says this is a political move, this is quite likely just economics.
Peak coal was in 2007, and has been falling rapidly since. We are currently generating about 1/3 the electricity from coal in 2023 vs 2007[0].
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...