Growing up in a quiet town in New Hampshire, I never saw any mention of my hometown of around eight thousand in the news, and I never expected to. So it was quite the surprise when my tiny town suddenly began making headlines in the fall of 2019. The reason? It is home to Merrimack Station, the largest of the three coal-fired power plants remaining in New England – and the only one with no plans to shut down. Between September and December of 2019, a series of protests both at Merrimack Station and on the train tracks carrying coal to the plant made a very public statement throughout the state of New Hampshire. However, more than a year later, very little has changed regarding the operation of this plant.
At a first glance, closing Merrimack Station does not seem like it would be an especially difficult battle. New England is not a region which has had a historic dependence on coal and Merrimack Station does not provide many jobs or comprise a substantial component of the regional power grid. So why is there so much resistance to closing this plant – and more broadly, why has coal, long-acknowledged as the “dirtiest” of all fossil fuels, retained so much political clout in the United States?
...coal has been postured as a symbolic representation of 'the way things should be.'
The answer is, of course, complicated, but much of it seems to come down to one relatively simple element – coal has been postured as a symbolic representation of “the way things should be.” Maintaining dependence on coal keeps the United States’ “coal heyday” alive in the popular memory and portrays it as a past ideal which is still within reach. This posturing is perhaps most obviously and recently visible in statements of support by former president Donald Trump, who very publicly affirmed his support of the coal industry multiple times, even explicitly calling for “putting our great coal miners back to work,” directly alluding to coal as a symbol of a past which we should return to. This type of messaging serves to reaffirm the belief throughout much of Appalachia, in particular, that coal is more than just a source of energy, but a “way of life” which is being threatened. However, it seems as though this logic may not hold for very long. Traditionally, conservative voters have opposed a coal phaseout more strongly than self-identified progressive or moderate voters, but new polls are showing that even in the most coal-friendly locations, support for renewables and a coal phaseout is growing strongly.
Perhaps the more enduring positive attribute of coal is the fact that it is an incredibly cheap source of energy. Even proponents of a coal phaseout have noted that the elimination of the Merrimack Station coal plant in my hometown, which contributes less than 1% of the total electric demand for the New England grid, would likely somewhat increase prices for consumers. However, this is also not an infallible fact. Carbon taxes, a longtime popular strategy for reducing fossil fuel dependence, would increase the price and decrease the viability of coal, particularly on power grids with an initial coal dependence similar to New England’s. Plus, even without these taxes, coal plants like Merrimack Station are quite expensive to maintain, with environmental upgrades like mercury scrubbers costing more than enough to offset any initial financial benefits of coal usage.
In the long run, it seems as though coal is clearly on its way out. But the shorter-term future of plants like Merrimack Station is less clear. Merrimack Station is currently facing legal action from the Sierra Club and Conservation Law Foundation – environmental organizations which argue that the plant doesn’t meet the requirements of its EPA-issued permit to operate, leaving the future of this particular plant hanging in the balance of this case. Still, climate activists say that we do not have enough time for coal usage to naturally slow to a stop – and I tend to agree with them. But the history of “coal heritage” in the United States makes any effort to speed up the process far more complicated and challenging than one may expect at a first glance.
Susannah Budd is a junior Geology major at Pomona from Bow, New Hampshire. She is especially interested in agriculture, food systems, and sustainable soil science.