The news that a big (350MW) is sniffing around the site of the closed Merrimack Station power plant in Bow, N.H., isn’t really surprising, but it is depressing.
The 343-acre site has a 115 kV connection to the grid, a rail line to haul in equipment and is next to the Merrimack River for cooling water, so you can see how data centers would love it.
The depressing part is that prior to Trump 2.0’s deliberate destruction of anything competing with fossil fuels, the site’s owners (Granite Shore Power) had a vision of building many megawatts of solar on the site, firmed up by a slew of batteries. The smaller Schiller site in Portsmouth was going to host batteries to help stabilize the grid and help supply the region’s growing offshore wind sector. Here’s my story detailing those plans. It is from May 2024 but might as well have been in a different century for all the connection it has to today’s reality.
The whole site quite large – 343 acres – so I guess there’s room for a data center as well as a bunch of solar panels. But the thumb of finances and regulations are pushing on the scale for the former, not the latter.
Incidentally, note that the site’s two small, kerosene-fired generators, totaling 43 megawatts, are still operating and aren’t affected by the coal-plant shutdown. They are peaker plants designed to fire up quickly to meet peak demand. Ideally they run for just an hour or two at a time until the price of electricity falls below a certain point (i.e., the need for immediate electricity to balance the grid has dissipated).
