Coal Is Dirty. Amid Protests, Why New England Is Still Burning It For Power

The Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire. (Annie Ropeik/NHPR)

On a freezing night in December, about a dozen climate activists stood on the train tracks in a wooded section of West Boylston, Mass. They huddled together, headlamps and flashlights pointing south towards an approaching coal train.

The light from the train’s headlights got brighter, and the horns blared louder and longer, but the activists stayed put. In past protests, the slow-moving train bound for New Hampshire had stopped after “scouts” a few miles ahead called the railroad’s emergency dispatcher to report people on the tracks.

This time, the train gave no sign of slowing.

The activists finally ran off the tracks when the train was about 50 feet away. No one was hurt, and the train continued on to one of the region’s last remaining coal-fired power plants: the Merrimack Generation Station in Bow, New Hampshire.

“They are willing to go to crazy lengths to deliver coal to this plant,” said Lila Kohrman-Glaser of 350 New Hampshire, one of the people who stood on the tracks that night. “But we’ll be back and we will keep up this campaign until we have effectively ended the use of coal in New England.”

When you think about New England, coal probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But New England does burn it for electricity, albeit a very small amount, and only on days when electricity demand is exceptionally high.

According to ISO-NE, which manages the grid, just 1% of our electricity came from coal in 2018. But for those on the tracks, that’s still too much. They want to kill coal once and for all.

Read the rest of this story at WBUR’s website.