In case you missed it, we have achieved one of our campaign goals – we have a shutdown date for Merrimack Station, the last coal-fired power plant on the grid in New England!
Our friends at 350.org wrote about it this way:
GOODBYE to coal in New England, US
A little louder for those in the back: No Coal No Gas, a campaign launched by the Climate Disobedience Center and 350 New Hampshire, has successfully SHUT DOWN New England’s last remaining coal plant. After years of pressure from direct action and lawsuits, coal company Granite Shore Power made a historic deal with the EPA to transition their coal plants to renewable energy.
This is a powerful reminder that climate progress isn’t only possible within ideal conditions. We can’t outspend fossil fuel executives. But we can use our power to expose them and turn the tide of public pressure. And we can make it so that they have no choice but to be part of the transition.
From Dr. Sandra Steingraber’s view of our win:
The unreasonable ones show us by their courage what reasonableness looks like. This kind of activism is physically miserable, scary, mentally difficult, and breeds 10,000 critics. But it opens a space for change where there was none.
Scrappy groups of organized people are what make massive societal shifts possible, and we’re only getting started doing what must be done.
We have come this far together because our first commitment is to building community – an organizing space where there is always room for one more person and where we encourage one another to show up with our skills and our despair, our hopes and our growing edges. We have come this far because together we are committed to show what’s possible when we understand “impossible” to be an organizing challenge, rather than a fixed, unchanging reality.
We have NOT come this far together to declare victory and then step away from our shared work. This victory gives us a glimpse of what it would be like for people to decide our own futures, to claim a more equitable and life-sustaining world. So we are ready to expand our work, ready to welcome more people into it, ready to build more connections and possibilities.
We shut down one dirty power plant that only burned coal when electrical usage was high in the region. But we know that if we are going to respond to scale of the climate crisis – and thereby take the kind of action that this moment requires – our actions must be bolder. We have to be more courageous and think bigger.
So we’ve named a new goal to replace the one we just achieved: shut down ALL the fossil-fuel-fired power plants that run occasionally, the peaker plants, in New England. This will free up our ratepayer dollars that are used to keep the peakers on standby so they can be used instead to hasten a just energy transition. Battery storage fills in perfectly in moments of high demand, as do gravity storage and geothermal. There are options. We will put pressure on the grid to change faster. We will do it together.
In order to shut down the fossil fueled power plants that run at high demand times, we will need to show we can responsively adjust the amount of electricity we use at such times. The ENTIRE regional electrical grid is structured around these sporadic peak demand moments, not average electricity usage. We can prevent over-building by showing the grid operator what’s possible. We are launching a community-based project to shift what’s happening on the grid in those moments of peak demand. From our project announcement:
We will stay grounded in community and mutuality because we are more than individual "consumers." We have the power to choose to work collaboratively to shift our relationship to energy use, to become more intentional. And this means that together we have the power to transform how the energy markets in our region work. The whole thing runs on our money, so let's dig in and make the system work for the communities that are most impacted by decision-makers that most of us have never heard of.
As Audre Lorde reminds us, “Revolution is not a one-time event.” Let’s keep dreaming bigger and showing up boldly together!
- Marla and Leif for the No Coal No Gas campaign
