Drive down River Road in Bow past dusk and the old smokestacks at Merrimack Station still catch the last light, dark and still, the way they have been since the plant burned its last ton of coal in September 2025. Ronald Jobel has watched vapor rise from those stacks for years from his home on Golden View Drive. Now that the plant is dark, he has a new question to watch instead, and so does most of the town: what happens to those 343 acres next.
For days now, the answer everyone in Bow keeps repeating is "data center." The trouble is that nobody has actually proposed one.
What got filed in April, and what didn't
Here is the part that gets lost every time this story gets retold at the transfer station or in a Facebook comment thread. Back in April 2026, Granite Shore Power, the company that owns the shuttered Merrimack Station, filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission asking Eversource to study whether a 350-megawatt project could connect to the regional power grid. That filing is public. Anyone can read it.
What the filing does not say is where the project would go or what it would be used for. It is a viability study, the kind of paperwork a company files when it wants to know if a piece of infrastructure could theoretically support a large amount of new electric load, before it commits to anything specific. No site plan. No building. No formal use identified.
The leap from "someone asked a question about grid capacity" to "Bow is getting a data center" happened entirely outside that filing.
How a business address became the headline
The bridge was a social media post. New Hampshire's Consumer Advocate, Donald Kreis, described a meeting among his staff, the state Department of Energy, and Eversource employees where an Eversource executive mentioned that a developer was weighing a data center somewhere in the state. Kreis didn't name the town or the site in that post. But Granite Shore Power's business address happens to be Merrimack Station, and the FERC filing's 350-megawatt figure lined up with the kind of load a large data center draws. Reporters connected the dots, and within days the story had a location: Bow.
Even the size of the thing depends on who you're asking. The FERC filing points to 350 megawatts. Kreis, describing what he heard secondhand in that meeting, put the number closer to 200. Either figure would qualify as what the industry calls a hyperscale facility, generally anything over 100 megawatts. For scale, a 2026 report from the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that 100 megawatts is roughly enough to power 80,000 homes, close to ten times Bow's entire population of roughly 8,400 residents.
None of that changes the fact that Bow's own Select Board Chair, Kip McDaniel, would not confirm the site when reporters first asked. The town's official statement, posted to its Facebook page after the story broke, put it plainly:
"No proposal has been submitted to the Town. There is nothing before the Planning Board, and nothing concrete for residents to react to yet."
That sentence is worth sitting with, because it means every argument playing out in Concord newsrooms and at the State House this week is happening about a project that has not yet cleared the first procedural hurdle in Bow itself.
The tax math that explains why anyone cares this much
If you want to understand why a rumor moved this fast, look at Bow's balance sheet, not its rumor mill. The town's property tax rate currently sits at $20 per $1,000 of assessed value. When Merrimack Station was still running under its previous owner, Public Service of New Hampshire, the plant alone generated roughly 70 percent of the town's total property tax revenue. Since the coal operation shut down, that revenue has largely disappeared, and the town has been hunting for a replacement ever since.
McDaniel has been direct about what a new large-load tenant could mean for that math. Speaking to reporters, he pointed to Bow's roughly $2.5 billion in total real estate value and called a project of this scale "an absolute game changer for our town's tax base." He's also noted that Bow has spent 15 years trying to attract exactly this kind of development to the parcels zoned for it, which is a longer runway than most residents may realize.
That context matters because it explains why town leadership sounds cautiously open even while state officials sound alarmed. They are looking at two different ledgers. One is the town's revenue sheet. The other is the statewide electric grid.
A pattern residents have seen on this site before
This isn't the first big plan floated for these 343 acres since the plant went dark. When Merrimack Station's coal operation shut down, Granite Shore Power executives said at the time they intended to repurpose the parcel for solar power and battery storage. That plan never materialized. One Bow resident, identified in local coverage only as Lull, told a reporter she'd hoped the site would become a clean energy hub instead, and now worries about a "massive concrete building" that drains rather than feeds the grid.
So the honest version of this story isn't "coal plant becomes data center." It's "coal plant closes, an announced solar plan quietly evaporates, and seven months later a FERC filing turns into the region's biggest speculation story before a single alternative use has actually broken ground." Residents who remember the solar announcement have reason to treat any new headline about this site with the same wait-and-see instinct.
Here's what's actually confirmed versus what's still speculation
| Confirmed | Still speculation or unconfirmed |
|---|---|
| Granite Shore Power filed a FERC request in April for a 350-megawatt grid study | The site of any project (inferred from the company's business address, not stated in the filing) |
| Merrimack Station closed in September 2025 and was previously slated for retirement in 2028 | Whether the use is a data center at all (Kreis described it that way; the filing doesn't) |
| Bow's property tax rate is $20 per $1,000 assessed value | The exact project size (350 MW per FERC, roughly 200 MW per Kreis's account) |
| No proposal has been filed with Bow's Planning Board | Whether Granite Shore Power will pursue this site versus another New Hampshire location |
The moratorium wave that arrived before the town's process did
While Bow's Planning Board has seen nothing, Concord has seen plenty. Governor Kelly Ayotte told reporters at an Executive Council meeting in Durham that she plans to include a data center moratorium in the state's next budget, saying flatly that the state doesn't have the energy capacity to support one without raising electric prices for everyone else. Cinde Warmington, running in the Democratic primary for governor, used the Bow story to renew her own call for a statewide moratorium. Executive Councilor Karen Liot Hill pointed to the legislature's failure to pass a similar measure earlier this year and argued the state shouldn't wait another ten months to fix that gap.
Bow Selectboard member and state representative Eleana Colby has taken a more procedural position, arguing that New Hampshire currently lacks a legal framework that lets towns write ordinances specific to data centers at all. Her point isn't that Bow should say no. It's that the town doesn't yet have the tools to say anything with confidence, one way or the other.
There are currently 10 data centers operating in New Hampshire, most of them clustered around Manchester, and none in Merrimack County. If Bow ends up hosting one, it would be a first for the county, which is part of why the reaction outran the paperwork so quickly.
What Nottingham already showed Bow
This isn't the first New Hampshire town to get ahead of itself on a data center rumor this year. When a similar story broke in Nottingham back in May, a crowd of residents showed up to the town's planning board meeting before any formal application had even been filed. Bow appears to be tracking a similar arc, minus the crowd so far, since there's nothing yet on a Bow agenda to show up for.
That pattern is useful for residents trying to figure out where to actually direct their attention. The real decision point in Bow won't happen on social media or in a governor's press conference. It will happen if and when Granite Shore Power or a partner files an actual site plan with Bow's Planning Board, which under the town's own procedures triggers public hearings where residents get a formal say. McDaniel has said as much himself, noting that any project of this scale would have to clear a detailed, multi-step planning process before anything gets built.
What to actually watch
If you live in Bow, the fastest way to separate signal from noise is to skip the statehouse quotes for now and watch two things instead. First, the agenda for Bow's Planning Board meetings, since that's where an actual application would have to surface before anything advances. Second, the town's own communications channels, since that's where McDaniel's office has been posting updates as the story develops. Everything else, right now, is commentary on a filing that doesn't name a site, describing a project whose size depends on who's talking, at an address nobody in Bow has officially confirmed.
That's not a reason to stop paying attention. It's a reason to know exactly what you're paying attention to.
Whatever happens with the old Merrimack Station site, Bow's mix of established neighborhoods, open land, and a tax base large enough to make a single project this consequential is part of what makes the town worth understanding closely, whether you've lived there for twenty years or you're just starting to look at what a move to Merrimack County might mean. If you want a local read on how stories like this one connect to the broader Bow and Merrimack County market, Waz Homes is a good place to start that conversation.
