A federal appeals court has ruled officials in Nashua, N.H., engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when they denied requests to fly certain politically charged flags, while allowing others, on the city’s “citizen flag pole.”

Bethany and Stephen Scaer, whose requests to hoist banners with the slogans “Save Women’s Sports” and “An Appeal to Heaven” were rejected, teamed up with the Institute for Free Speech and filed a lawsuit in 2024 alleging their First Amendment rights were violated.

The trial court in New Hampshire initially concluded the Scaers hadn’t demonstrated a likelihood that their case would succeed, since the flags approved for display at City Hall constitute government speech. But three judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision Monday, finding that the flagpole in question had actually been a venue for private speech all along.

The case relates to one Boston lost in 2022, when the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the city had unconstitutionally rejected an application to fly a Christian flag.

Even though Nashua sought to clarify its policy in response to that 2022 precedent, the city’s process for deciding which flags from the general public would be allowed still didn’t convert private speech into government speech, according to the First Circuit ruling.

“Nashua was doing no more than simply approving that private speech with which it agreed,” Judge Sandra L. Lynch wrote in the ruling, joined by judges Gustavo A. Gelpí and Jeffrey R. Howard.

In a statement, Beth Scaer said the ruling offers a sense of vindication.

“No one should have to face government censorship for expressing their beliefs,” she said. “We’re thrilled with this victory for free speech rights throughout New England.”

Nathan Ristuccia, an attorney with the Institute for Free Speech who argued the case on appeal, said his team is delighted by the ruling.

“As the First Circuit recognized, governments cannot get away with censorship by labeling that censorship ‘government speech,’” Ristuccia said.

Before the lawsuit was filed, Nashua Mayor James W. Donchess said the city declined to fly the “Save Women’s Sports” flag because officials interpreted it as implying transgender people should face discrimination.

The Scaers, who regularly demonstrate against gender-affirming medical interventions for minors and against inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ sports, rejected the notion that their messaging is transphobic.

As for the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which features a pine tree, Donchess said city officials want to avoid endorsing the additional meaning it has taken on in recent years.

The banner emerged during the American Revolution, with a nod to the Pine Tree Riot in New Hampshire, an act of American resistance that preceded the Boston Tea Party. More recently, the flag has also been used by Christian nationalists, including some who carried it to the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent mob delayed the certification of President Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat.

In her application to raise the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, Beth Scaer said she wanted to honor the soldiers from Nashua who fought and died at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. She and her husband said their request has nothing to do with the Capitol riot.

Nashua has also declined to fly several other flags since the 2022 policy update, including a “pro-life” flag and a Palestinian flag, according to the lawsuit.

Nashua’s attorney, Steven A. Bolton, said on Tuesday that the city has not yet determined whether to file an appeal. He noted that the appellate ruling calls for the trial court to grant interim declaratory relief while the case proceeds.

Bolton said the city has stopped inviting community members to fly their own flags.

“A new policy was adopted more than a year ago, and we no longer use the term ‘citizen’s flag pole,’” he said. “We no longer accept applications from other parties to fly flags on any of the poles on the City Hall grounds.”

Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.

CANDIA, NH (WGME) – Early Monday morning, a Nashua man died following a crash on Route 101 eastbound in Candia, New Hampshire.

Joseph H. Lavoie, 58, of Nashua, had been driving along Route 101 eastbound near Exit 3 when he lost control of his car, resulting in a drift off the right side of the highway before striking the cement bridge at the Old Candia Road overpass.

State troopers arrived at the scene to find Lavoie’s car on fire, though several passing drivers had helped to pull Lavoie out of his car. The fire was quickly extinguished.

Lavoie was taken to the hospital where he later died from his injuries.

The crash remains under investigation. Anyone with information that may assist the investigation is asked to contact Trooper Kevin LeDoux via email at Kevin.P.LeDeoux@dos.nh.gov.

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.