Established in the Enron area. Do you think these plants are fully funded? Near bankrupt nuclear plants or dead ender plants should be on a special NRC watch list. Before this is over, we are going to totally destroy a nuclear facility. Most of the corporations will rush to the door to dump their nuclear plants.
FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC), a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp., operates the corporation’s three nuclear power facilities: the two-unit Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station in Shippingport, Pennsylvania; the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio; and the Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Perry, Ohio.
Together, these facilities produce nearly 4,000 megawatts of electricity – nearly a third of our company’s generating capacity.
Natural gas prices are going to continue to decline.
FirstEnergy will dump coal and nuclear regardless of what the federal government does to help, CEO says.
Anya Litvak
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The owner of Bruce Mansfield and Beaver Valley power plants in Beaver County have been meeting with creditors over the past several months to figure out how to restructure FirstEnergy’s competitive generation business.
Chuck Jones, the CEO of Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., told analysts on Friday that discussions are ongoing with two groups of creditors that represent the majority of bond holders, as the subsidiary that operates most of FirstEnergy’s powerplants continues to weigh filing for bankruptcy.
“In a restructuring scenario, the preferred outcome would be agreement with creditors,” he said.
Mr. Jones said neither he nor the corporate parent, FirstEnergy, have been involved in the discussions. So far, that has been handled by the board of directors of FirstEnergy Solutions, which runs the company’s power plants which aren’t covered by customer rates.
FirstEnergy announced last year that it wants to transition into a fully-regulated company, where all of its operations are supported by ratepayers.
“I want to be very clear,” Mr. Jones said on Friday. “We have no interest in maintaining generating assets that have commodity exposure and we’re moving forward with exiting the commodity-exposed business.”
He made the declaration in response to a question from an analyst wondering if FirstEnergy might hold on to the plants if a proposal from the U.S. Department of Energy to fully reimburse coal and nuclear plants gets enacted.
“I don’t think there’s any connection between them,” Mr. Jones said.
“I don’t think the DOE initiative has anything to do with FirstEnergy despite what’s been reported in some of the media,” he said.
That was likely a reference to stories published by the Associated Press in August which referenced a letter that Murray Energy Corp. CEO Robert Murray sent to the White House. The letter sought emergency relief for FirstEnergy’s coal plants, which Murray supplies.
It opened: “Last evening in Huntington, West Virginia, after President Donald Trump met briefly with Mr. Charles E. Jones, Chief Executive Officer of FirstEnergy Corporation and the undersigned, he turned to you and said ‘tell Cohn to do whatever these two want him to do.’” That is an apparent reference to economic advisor Gary Cohn.
In the same letter, Mr. Murray said that if the emergency declaration wasn’t forthcoming, Murray Energy would be forced to file for bankruptcy in October.
Murray’s spokesperson Gary Broadbent said on Friday that the company has no plans to do so.
“Indeed, Murray Energy is current with all of its debt payments and has liquidity,” he said, attributing the apparent turnaround to “regulatory reforms that have recently been enacted by the Trump Administration.”
While the federal government rejected the emergency plea, the Department of Energy asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to hurry up and act on its proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants.
FirstEnergy submitted a 3,614-page comment on the proposal, saying, “The urgency is real.”
On the call with analysts Friday, Mr. Jones declined to speculate on how the DOE effort will turn out and assured that while the board of FirstEnergy Solutions will be paying attention to it, it won’t delay the process of getting rid of these unregulated powerplants.
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