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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
TEWKSBURY, MASS. (WHDH) – The father of a 23-year-old man who was shot in a random attack at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire before the shooter turned the gun on himself spoke with 7NEWS Thursday about his son’s recovery.
On July 5, officers responded to a reported shooting in the area of 29 Ocean Boulevard at approximately 1:20 a.m. and found a 23-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman suffering from gunshot wounds, according to a joint statement issued by Attorney General John M. Formella, New Hampshire State Police Colonel Mark B. Hall, and Hampton Police Department Chief Alexander J. Reno. Both were taken to a nearby hospital.
Robert Perault said his son Chase was shot three times while he was walking with his 25-year-old girlfriend at the beach.
“Bullet was lodged in his left arm, and then two in the lungs,” Perault said. “It just blows your mind that this happens. I can’t explain any other way, it’s just a random act of violence.”
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Soon after, at the intersection of P Street and Ashworth Avenue, officers encountered the suspect, Tyshawn Cooper, 21, of Taylors, South Carolina, who pulled a handgun, raised it, and shot himself in the head as an officer fired at him, officials said. Cooper was a sailor in the United States Navy.
After an autopsy, Cooper’s cause of death was determined to be suicide.
Perault said his son and his girlfriend have both been released from the hospital but are continuing to recover from their injuries.
“The fact that he was threatening, so they say, people – to shoot somebody prior to that was kind of an indication that this was something going on,” Perault said.
He said his biggest questions are what Cooper was doing with the gun, and how he got the gun in the first place. He said he has received “not a word” from the Navy in the wake of the attack.
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Chase graduated from Tewksbury High School, loves fishing, and now works in construction with his father. Perault said his son has only had one question on his mind since he first woke up at the hospital.
“‘Why did he shoot us?’ That was the very first thing to come out of his mouth,” Perault said.
(Copyright (c) 2026 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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An investigation into the incident is active, officials said.
The Gorham, New Hampshire police chief has been placed on administrative leave following the release of a video showing a physical altercation inside the police station.
In the station’s security footage — acquired by Stephen Gregory, of Berlin, New Hampshire, who sent it to WMUR, the outlet reported — Chief Jimmy Willhoite is seen grabbing a man by the throat and shoving him against a wall.
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“Due to the allegations involving our Chief of Police, he has been placed on administrative leave while the allegations are being investigated,” Town Manager Joe Hemings said in a statement to Boston.com. Hemmings denied to comment further on the allegations.
Gregory told WMUR that the recording captures a confrontation between him and Willhoite that escalated when the chief grabbed Gregory by the neck and pushed him against the station wall.
Prior to the incident, Gregory was attending the annual Fourth of July carnival in Gorham with his wife and saw a man who, he says, threatened to stab him about two months earlier.
After the man allegedly yelled at him, Gregory went to the police station to report him — and then the confrontation with Willhoite happened, Gregory told WMUR.
The state’s Department of Justice Public Integrity Unit and NH Police Standard and Training Council is investigating the incident, Hemmings said.
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The New Hampshire Attorney General’s office told Boston.com that it would “neither confirm nor deny any potential New Hampshire Department of Justice Public Integrity Unit matter,” citing state privacy laws.
Town officials said Gregory was arrested that night and charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct, though Gregory disputes he was arrested, WMUR reported.
“The safety of our community and the integrity of our law enforcement agencies are top priorities for the Town,” Hemmings said. “We take all allegations of misconduct seriously.”
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Jack Savage, president of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, spoke at the first Jaffrey Amos Fortune Forum of the season on Friday evening about the state of New Hampshire’s forests, conservation efforts and where he’d like to see the state in the next 15 years.
