The biggest national news in 2025 often involved energy — how to make it, who gets to use it, who is going to need it. New Hampshire has sidestepped most of those questions so far but still saw plenty of energy news.

Goodbye, coal

The closing of the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow sounds like New Hampshire’s biggest energy news of the year and got a lot of national coverage along the lines of “New England shuts down coal!” but to be honest, it didn’t make much difference. The plant had been winding down for years, having run for fewer than 30 days in 2024, and would almost certainly have shut in a year or so because it lost what is known as capacity funding.

The more interesting question is what will replace it. Granite Shore Power President Jim Andrews has long touted plans to turn Merrimack Station, as well as the long-closed Schiller site in Portsmouth, into 21st century power plants using batteries and solar power, with perhaps some offshore wind assembly on the shores of the Piscataqua River.

But Donald Trump was elected and promptly began to trash wind and solar power, yanking subsidies and throwing up regulatory roadblocks. Granite Shore now says it is looking at all possibilities.

Both sites have excellent connections to the power grid, which makes them very valuable.

We need more electricity

New Hampshire, like New England in general, have not been swamped with proposals to build massive, power-hungry data centers for bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence. Those proposals have led to forecasts that national demand for electricity will spike by a quarter or more within a few years.

ISO-New England, the group that runs the six-state power grid, projects an 11% increase in electricity demand over the next decade, largely driven by the electrification of heating and transportation. That’s a lot, especially after years of stagnant demand, but it’s not panic-inducing.

Sidestepping regulation

New Hampshire is set to become the first state to allow energy providers to skip most utility regulation if they don’t connect to the grid. Supporters say it adds much-needed flexibility to the hidebound energy industry while critics call it a sop to very large energy users, such as data centers. It’s not clear how much it will be used, but it’s an interesting experiment, at least.

Community solar OK, wind not so much

The Republican-controlled legislature isn’t quite as anti-solar power as President Trump but it shows a lack of enthusiasm for renewable energy. They passed a bill loosening stormwater runoff rules for solar arrays but tightened the Renewable Energy Fund and as the year ended, they were looking to make severe changes to the Renewable Energy Portfolio.

On the other hand, there’s community solar. Thanks to a series of bills over the past few years, arrays up to 5 megawatts can share production with multiple customers, making big projects that opened or are being built in Exeter, Bedford, Derry, Warner and now Concord financially feasible. It seems likely that 2026 will set a record for the most solar added to the grid in New Hampshire. If the legislature would let private companies be community-solar customers, we’d do even better.

As for wind power, legislators echoed Trump’d hatred of the industry. Gov. Ayotte agreed to shorten the name of the Office of Offshore Wind Industry Development and Energy Innovation to simply the Office of Energy Innovation as part of removing virtually all support for wind power on land or in the sea. Not that we gave much support to begin with.

Ironically, this month saw New England receive a record amount of power from wind turbines — more than 1,600 megawatts at one point — as the Vineyard Wind offshore farm finally got up to speed.

What about natural gas? Nuclear? Heating oil?

As has been the case for many years, natural gas was the fuel to supply about half of New England’s electricity in 2025 and heating to about one-fifth of New Hampshire’s homes.

Many politicians are making noises about building more pipelines to bring in more natural gas from New York or Pennsylvania; Gov. Ayotte expressed support for bringing the proposed Constitution Pipeline, which was killed in 2020, back to life. Many argue that such work would be prohibitively expensive and make the region even more dependent on a single type of fuel.

Natural gas has traditionally been very cheap compared to other types of fuel but its price is increasingly affected by global patterns because of an increase in exports.

A separate question is whether the push to electrify the region’s heating can cut into our use of heating oil. Northern New England is by far the national leader in using that dirty fuel for heating; switching to electric heat pumps is almost always cheaper and definitely cleaner. New Hampshire is one of five states in the New England Heat Pump Accelerator, which looks to spend $450 million from Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to encourage more heat pumps.

New Jersey gubernatorial candidates and the Independent Expenditure-Only Filers (IEFs) who promoted them shredded multiple records by spending more than $259 million on this year’s primary and general elections, according to an analysis by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC).

In nominal dollars1, New Jersey’s spending total was the fourth largest amount of dollars ever spent during a gubernatorial election year nationally and ranked sixth when past totals were converted to 2025 dollars to reflect inflation’s impact.

On a per capita basis, calculated by dividing total election spending by the state’s population, New
Jersey ranked first nationally (Table A3).

“It is now evident that this year’s gubernatorial election was the most expensive New Jersey election in
state history by a large margin. It was also one of the top ten costliest gubernatorial elections ever in the nation,” said Joe Donohue, ELEC’s deputy director.

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(WHTM)– Recreational marijuana is not legal in Pennsylvania despite urging from a majority of Democrats in the legislature, but that could change in the new year due to an unlikely advocate.

President Trump issued an executive order last week moving marijuana from a Schedule I drug, which means highly addictive, to a Schedule III drug, which is less addictive with some medical benefit.

Many see this as the president legitimizing marijuana and giving political cover for Republicans, who have been resistant to supporting legalization.

The executive order also called for more solid research on the benefits and harms of marijuana.

John Gallagher, a researcher, addiction specialist, and professor at Alvernia University, voiced support for more research. He said more research is needed and won’t wade into the political debate over whether to legalize it.

He also said the marijuana industry’s claim that it is not addictive is not true.

“I go back to the two things that we know. Without a doubt, cannabis is absolutely an addicting drug for some. And cannabis absolutely has withdrawal symptoms for some people become dependent on it,” Gallagher said.

He added that it’s appropriate that it was re-classified from schedule one to schedule three because its addictiveness is not the same as that of some schedule one substances.

Gallagher suspects Pennsylvania will legalize adult-use cannabis, given all surrounding states have. He also said there hasn’t been enough research on its medical benefits.