Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.
By ARNIE ALPERT, Active with the Activists
PEMBROKE—On Saturday, five years after it launched a campaign using nonviolent civil disobedience to shut down a coal-fired power plant in Bow, New Hampshire, No Coal No Gas held a celebration in Pembroke’s Memorial Park marking the commitment of the plant’s owner, Granite Shore Power, to end coal combustion in 2027 and convert the facility to a “renewable energy park.”
But No Coal No Gas isn’t going away: several hours before the celebration, its members displayed banners and painted slogans at four other New Hampshire fossil-fueled power plants calling for their permanent closure as well. At one of the plants, Newington Station, they hung a 170-foot “No Coal No Gas” banner from a smokestack, resulting in the arrest of five people on criminal trespass charges.
The new campaign focuses on “peaker” plants, those which sit idle most of the time but crank up in periods of high demand, such as hot days when use of air conditioners spikes. To keep their peaker plants in operation, operators earn revenue year-round through customers’ electric bills according to rates set by ISO New England, a not-for-profit regional transmission organization that is authorized by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to ensure the availability of competitively priced wholesale electricity for the New England region, which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
According to No Coal No Gas, ISO has authorized nearly $350 million for the region’s peaker plants for the period June 1, 2027- May 31, 2028. The payments represent 10 to 20 percent of New Englanders’ electric bills, they said.
“Peaker plants are the dirtiest, most expensive, least efficient energy source on our grid, and they cost rate payers money all the time, whether they are sitting idle, which they do the vast majority of the year, or kicking on on the hottest and coldest days of the year to provide extra power when we supposedly need it,” said Lena Greenberg of Burlington, VT, one of two activists who hung the giant banner from Newington Station. “There are other ways to manage demand for electricity,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg and Talia Trigg said they started climbing the tower at about 5:15 AM Saturday, reaching a platform 270 feet above the ground 40 minutes later. “Neither of us came into this summer with a ton of rock-climbing experience, but we’re lucky to have a lot of friends and colleagues who are super knowledgeable about this stuff, and so we went into the climb fully equipped, safety gear wise,” said Trigg, a resident of Washington, NH.
Power plant security personnel were on the scene when Trigg and Greenberg were halfway back down. By the time they reached the ground, Newington police were there, too. The two climbers and three supporters, Nathan Phillips, Leif Taranta, and Atlas Cooper, were arrested and charged with criminal trespass. Their arraignment is set for October 7.
Like Merrimack Station in Bow, the Newington plant is run by Granite Shore Power (GSP), a subsidiary of Atlas Holdings, a Connecticut investment firm which also owns Greenridge Generation, a bitcoin mining operation in upstate New York, and Pelican Power, which operates four power plants in Louisiana and Texas.
New Hampshire’s three other fossil-fueled peaker plants, all owned by GSP, received visits from No Coal No Gas on Saturday, as well. At Schiller Station in Portsmouth, which formerly burned coal and like the Bow plant is slated for conversion to a renewable energy park, activists left a banner reading “Congrats on the battery park. What’s all this then?” on a pile of coal which remains at the facility.
“That banner’s 35 feet across and 10 feet this way, and we hung it between two pylons that are right in front of a coal pile,” said Siobhan Senier of Epping. The plant has already been decommissioned, she said, and GSP said they’ll turn it into a battery park for renewably generated power, “but the battery park is only going to occupy three acres of that whole property.” Senier wants to know what the company plans to do with “this big honkin’ coal pile sitting there.”
At another GSP peaker plant, Lost Nation in Northumberland, activists planted goldenrod and hung a banner that said, “Peaker by Peaker, Plant by Plant.” Eleanor Reid of Hanover said planting native flowers is a form of natural remediation for disturbed areas. “Part of the whole shutting down the peakers is also we need to undo the damage that they’ve been doing to the air and the water and the land near them,” she said.
According to No Coal No Gas, another group painted a mural at a rarely used facility in Tamworth with the message, “Last year this oil-burning power plant cost us $331K.”
The No Coal No Gas campaign achieved its first notoriety on September 28, 2019, when several dozen activists wearing tyvek suits and carrying plastic buckets walked toward the Bow plant’s coal pile saying they would remove the coal “bucket by bucket” if that’s what it would take to shut the plant down. Sixty-seven people were arrested.
Later actions included nonviolent blockades of trains delivering coal to the plant, demonstrations at the offices of Atlas Holdings and the ISO, lobbying campaigns to halt Bow’s forward capacity payments, and more demonstrations and arrests at the Bow facility. The campaign is backed by staff support from two organizations, 350NH and the Climate Disobedience Center, both of which are dedicated to ending climate pollution. Using lyrics from Greg Greenway‘s song “Do What Must Be Done” as a motto, the campaign kept up a steady pace of organizing meetings, research, public education, and action to close New England’s last coal-fired power plant.
No Coal No Gas is not the only group which has opposed the operation of Merrimack Station, as the Bow plant is formally named. The actual shut-down declaration followed litigation by the NH Sierra Club and the Conservation Law Foundation. Announcing plans to cease coal-burning by 2028, Jim Andrews of Granite Shore Power said, “From our earliest days as owners and operators, we have been crystal clear; while our power occasionally is still on during New England’s warmest days and coldest nights, we were firmly committed to transitioning our facilities away from coal and into a newer, cleaner energy future.”
Critics, however, say the plant’s occasional operation still emits carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The plant failed a “stack test” for particulate matter last year. Another test was conducted on July 11. According to the Department of Environmental Services, results will be available by early September.
On Saturday afternoon at Memorial Park, which sits across the Merrimack River from the Bow power plant, about 35 members of No Coal No Gas listened to a set of music performed by the Leftist Marching Band, two speakers, and a presentation by the 350NH Youth Team. Afterwards, half of the group took to the river in canoes and kayaks. Before setting out on the water, Mary Beth Raven said she had contacted the NH Marine Patrol to assure them no civil disobedience was planned.
The ”kayaktivists” included Kai Parlett, a recent UNH grad who dressed in a dinosaur costume for the occasion. Parlett, who has been active with No Coal No Gas since she was in high school, said she has used the dino outfit for years to draw attention to the cause. “It’s time for fossil fuels to go extinct,” she said, like dinosaurs. Parlett said she enjoys “running around in a dinosaur suit just because it’s comical and it’s relatable and people engage with it.”
Marla Marcum, who has been with No Coal No Gas since the beginning, said the group decided in March to shift its focus to shutting down all of New England’s fossil-fueled peaker plants, including the New Hampshire facilities owned by GSP. Some of them never get turned on at all, she said, and others run rarely. While that might be a reason to downplay their climate impact, Marcum says they are the “low hanging fruit” for the energy transition needed to combat climate change. The money coming from ratepayers to keep them operating could be better used, she said.
We’re paying for the peaker plants to “just sit there,” Marcum said. “That’s an opportunity cost that we could be using to transition the grid. It’s holding up resources that would make the transition possible. We think at least half of them could be retired tomorrow.”
Others might disagree. The ISO issued an “energy emergency” on August 1 when regional temperatures soared and a “capacity deficiency” occurred. “Temperatures were higher than anticipated across New England during the late afternoon and early evening hours, leading consumer demand for electricity during the peak hour to be approximately 300 megawatts (MW) above forecasts from that morning,” an ISO statement said. Moreover, an unnamed 335 MW power plant went offline unexpectedly. “System operators used well-established procedures to balance supply and demand on the regional power system,” the ISO statement said, and the emergency was declared over after five hours without cuts affecting energy consumers.
No Coal No Gas says the problem may have been bad forecasting by ISO. Rebecca Beaulieu, a spokesperson, said, “If ISO-NE had a policy to respond to this outage with community conservation or demand response, they wouldn’t need to rely on fossil fuel peaker plants to make up the slack, and would have a more immediate way to reduce energy usage instead of using power plants that take hours to power up.”
Moreover, the regional energy system is in transition. The US Department of Energy announced a $389 million “Power Up” proposal on August 6 to boost the region’s capacity to integrate renewable power into its grid. The program includes “an innovative, multi-day battery energy storage system in Northern Maine to enhance grid resilience and optimize the delivery of renewable energy.” According to a DOE statement, “These investments will provide the New England region with access to thousands of megawatts of offshore wind, greater resource diversity, and increased reliability while lowering consumer costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
“We know that batteries aren’t a perfect solution,” Marcum acknowledged. “We also know that we’ve as a global community gotten ourselves to a point in history where we don’t have any perfect solutions available to us.” But through efforts of groups like No Coal No Gas, she believes, political will to speed the transition is growing.
Lena Greenberg, clearly exhausted from an early morning climb up and down a tower followed by hours in police custody, still had energy to outline what must be done. “It’s tremendously important to be strategic in our interventions and try to get the dirtiest, least efficient, most expensive energy sources on our grid taken offline as soon as possible,” Greenberg said, sitting with Talia Trigg in a pavilion at Memorial Park.
Instead of subsidizing fossil-fueled peaker plants, Greenberg said, we have to “incentivize really efficient electricity use, like heat pumps and getting people off of fossil fuels so that we can use electricity and then invest in new electrical sources like wind and solar and geothermal, so that we can really be using the renewable resources that we have without destroying the planet that makes it enjoyable to use them on.”
