The 350-Megawatt Study Town Votes Cannot Kill

Granite Shore Power has asked Eversource to study a 350-megawatt hookup at Bow’s closed Merrimack Station, enough power for a hyperscale AI data center. No site plan sits with the town. The fight has already started.

A warehouse conversion in Nottingham could be voted down. A retired coal plant that already owns the wires is a different problem, and that is the one New Hampshire is now in.

The Study in Bow Is Not a Permit

In April 2026, Public Service of New Hampshire, an Eversource subsidiary, filed a viability assessment agreement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for Granite Shore Power LLC. The papers do not name a data center. They ask whether a 350-megawatt “facility” can connect to the regional grid and what upgrades that hookup would need. Granite Shore Power is to pay about $75,000 for the work.

Donald Kreis, New Hampshire’s consumer advocate, filled in the missing noun. On Aug. 28, 2026, Eversource officials briefed state energy staff at Concord’s Walker Building. Kreis wrote that an executive “casually let slip” talks with a developer “interested in maybe building a data center in Bow,” then put the draw at “two hundred megawatts” at the maximum and said the number was in flux. The FERC study is larger. Both figures sit in hyperscale territory, the band IBM describes as loads above 100 megawatts.

William Hinkle, an Eversource spokesman, said the utility “only delivers power and does not develop data centers” and is “obligated to respond to all proposals from developers,” including studies the developer pays for. A town official later confirmed high-level talks about bringing a data center to Bow. Kip McDaniel, the Bow selectboard chair, said in September the town had not received an application and had no communication from Granite Shore Power about one.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The filing: An April 2026 FERC viability study covers a 350-megawatt interconnection paid for by Granite Shore Power.
• The verbal figure: Kreis wrote that an Eversource executive put a Bow data center at 200 megawatts at the maximum, with the number in flux.
• The town file: Bow has no development application and, as of the Sept. 22, 2026 selectboard meeting, no letter from the plant’s owner.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The tenant: No hyperscale operator has been named in the FERC papers or by the town.
• The power source: The filings do not say how the load would be served if it is built.
• The ISO queue: ISO-New England has said a large-load request under study would appear in its public queue; Bow is not there yet.

Granite Shore Power, which owns the nearly 400-acre Merrimack Station property, still describes the work as site review, not a done deal.

Since ceasing commercial operations, we have been going through the process of decommissioning the coal-fired generation and are thoughtfully evaluating all redevelopment options for the nearly 400-acre property, with a continued commitment to serving New Hampshire and the Bow community. No decisions have been made about redevelopment, and we have no firm plans for the site’s long-term future.

Granite Shore Power, statement, September 2026

Why the Coal Plant Still Has the Wires

Merrimack Station was New England’s last coal plant. Granite Shore Power said it ceased commercial operations on Sept. 12, 2025, years ahead of a 2028 settlement deadline with environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Agency. Two kerosene-fired generators totaling 43 megawatts remain in service. In its last years the coal units ran only on peak days.

The company had sold the next chapter as a “renewable energy park,” with solar and batteries using the same grid gear. Jim Andrews, then the head of Granite Shore Power, said in 2024 he was not planning on natural gas, though he did not rule it out. That pitch is now one option among others, and a 350-megawatt load is the option that pulled a crowd to the Bow municipal building.

The site is zoned industrial. It sits on the Merrimack River, which data halls use for cooling. It already has a transmission tie. Those three facts are why a warehouse on a rural lot and a dead plant are not the same fight. A town can rewrite a zoning map. It cannot pretend a point of interconnection is somewhere else.

More than 100 people gathered outside the Sept. 22, 2026 selectboard meeting. The No Coal, No Gas campaign, which spent years pushing the plant offline, is now circulating a petition against an AI hall on the same land. McDaniel has said the town would still have to judge any filing on the merits and against its ordinances. Neighbors in Pembroke have already noted that a riverfront hall can sit closer to their doors than to much of Bow.

Nottingham’s Vote Did Not Move the Megawatts

The first New Hampshire blowup was not a coal plant. It was a warehouse.

Tom Moulton, a Hampton businessman and founder of Sleepnet Corporation, asked Nottingham’s planning board for a conceptual look at a data center at 145 Old Turnpike Road, land he has owned since 2021 at the Nottingham Business Park. The lot had once been eyed for a USA Springs bottling plant, which also died under local pressure. A Change.org petition against Moulton’s plan drew more than 20,000 signatures.

He withdrew the conceptual request on May 27, 2026, hours before a planning board session that had been moved to a school gym. He did so without prejudice, leaving the door open. Moulton said he “kind of didn’t expect this at all.” Online claims of a “40-acre building” had spread; he said the proposed building would have been about 4 acres on a larger tract.

THE NOTTINGHAM CLOCK

1. April 29, 2026: Moulton’s conceptual consultation is signed for a data center at Nottingham Business Park.
2. May 27, 2026: He withdraws the request without prejudice after a regional backlash.
3. July 2026: The planning board, chaired by Drew Stevens, votes unanimously to send a 12-month freeze to a special town meeting.
4. Sept. 8, 2026: Voters approve the freeze, 1,335 to 143.

The special town election results were more than 90 percent in favor. The ordinance is written to protect health, safety, welfare, and the regional watershed while the town studies land use, infrastructure, and fiscal effects. Stevens has said the pause is also time to write zoning that could ban the use for good.

That is local government doing what it can do. It does not reduce ISO-New England’s appetite for a large load, and it does not cancel a FERC study on a plant site 50 minutes west. The megawatts did not vanish. They showed up where the transmission already is.

New Hampshire Already Runs Small Data Halls

The panic treats “data center” as a new species. The state already hosts ordinary halls. They are not hyperscale, and they are not 350 megawatts.

Nashua Technology Park, off Exit 1 at the Massachusetts line, still markets turnkey space in buildings once used by Hewlett-Packard and Dell. The listing for 300 Innovative Way shows 21,882 square feet still listed for lease on a 9.26-megawatt hall. Add the empty 2.65-megawatt and 3.97-megawatt rooms in the sister buildings and the campus posts 15.88 megawatts of named capacity inside a 750,000-square-foot office park. That is a real data center. It is not an AI campus, and it does not have the land for one.

The U.S. Data Center Map, updated in August 2026, counts 25 tracked New Hampshire facilities and projects, 24 of them operational, with 14.5 megawatts of tracked power. A 350-megawatt Bow hookup would be about 24 times that entire tally. Four of the state’s small halls sit in Manchester. This is not the Bow fight, and lumping them together is how a lease flyer becomes a town panic.

HOW THE SITES COMPARE

Concord’s Locke Road plan, from Northpoint Engineering and landowner Granite Municipal Manufacturing & Sales, is the other live file. It is a micro hall with office, garage, and a caretaker unit, not an AI barn. It still drew speakers to a planning board that voted to schedule the Oct. 21, 2026 hearing. A small project can still raise the same water and noise arguments, even when the draw is a rounding error next to Bow.

ISO-New England Has Barely Booked This Load

If Bow were already a regional certainty, it would be in the grid operator’s large-load forecast. It is not.

ISO-New England’s 2026 CELT large-load work lists two projects that cleared the bar of 20 megawatts and a formal study agreement: a 200-megawatt data center already in study in the Northeast Massachusetts and Boston zone, with a timeline through 2027, and an 85-megawatt electrification project in Connecticut through 2040. After the ISO’s project and use discounts, those loads add about 110 megawatts to peak demand in the 2030s and about 130 to 140 megawatts in the 2040s. Neither is under construction. The ISO expects no effect before winter 2027-28.

Mary Cate Colapietro, a senior communications specialist at ISO-New England, has said the region has not seen data-center growth on the scale of other U.S. grids and still needs rules if that changes. After a FERC show-cause order in docket EL26-72, the ISO is writing those rules now.

THE GRID CLOCK THIS FALL

• June 18, 2026: FERC opens EL26-72 on large loads and co-located load.
• Aug. 14, 2026: FERC grants a 90-day abeyance so ISO-New England can run a stakeholder process.
• Oct. 5 to Nov. 19, 2026: Developers may file into the ISO’s first full cluster study; a new heatmap shows where the wires still have room.
• Nov. 16, 2026: The ISO’s Nov. 16 tariff filing on large loads is due, including ideas that big new loads bring their own capacity and not dump upgrade costs on everyone else.

On Oct. 2, 2026, the ISO posted interactive maps of available transfer room and of the generation queue, which is still mostly batteries. A viability study at Eversource is one step below that system. It is also the step that makes a plant site valuable before a single server is ordered.

A 2027 Pause Trails the 2026 Grid Clock

Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she will put a multiyear data-center pause in her next state budget, the document that would take effect in July 2027. She has said New Hampshire does not have the energy for this use, and that even a town that wants the taxes cannot keep the rate hit inside its own border.

We know that there are other environmental impacts, including water, noise impact to local communities. And that’s why I think it’s appropriate that we have a moratorium on data centers, so that we can evaluate all of these concerns that have legitimately been raised: energy, water, noise, other concerns that members of the community have raised about siting data centers. I just don’t see a place for data centers here in New Hampshire.

Gov. Kelly Ayotte, September 2026

Cinde Warmington, the Democratic candidate for governor, has been calling for a statewide freeze since the Nottingham fight. Senate President Sharon Carson, a Londonderry Republican, said in mid-September the Senate would look at legislation so taxpayers do not “shoulder the costly demands” of these halls. A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll found 67 percent of residents strongly or somewhat oppose a data center in their own town, which is why both parties now talk like opponents.

Lawmakers have also floated 2027 bills that would pause siting and set a 30-megawatt line above which a project would pay for the grid work it causes. That is next year’s argument. This fall’s argument is the FERC study, the ISO tariff, and Concord’s Oct. 21 hearing. Democrats at a Merrimack River rally in September asked Ayotte for an executive order that would bite now. Waiting for House Bill 2 leaves those processes to run.

State Rep. Keith Ammon, a Hillsborough County Republican, wrote that the same crowd would have protested Manchester’s millyard. A mill reuse and a 350-megawatt point load are not the same planning problem, and the mill never asked Eversource for a viability study the size of a small city’s demand.

Nashua still has no hyperscale filing, and its technology park is the wrong shape for one. Nottingham used the ballot. Bow is being asked to treat a coal plant’s leftover wires as just another zoning case. The 350-megawatt study is already at FERC. The town application is not.