FirstEnergy Needs You To Toss Them a Rope

Awwww.... FirstEnergy had a bad year in 2016.

"There's blood in the water," Jones said in an October interview.

He added, "We've reduced benefits, we've reduced 401(k) matches, we froze wages. We've done a lot of things to try and offset lost revenue, but couldn't offset it entirely … We're evaluating everything we do as a company to try and find a way to close that gap. Because (what's been done so far) is not enough to get us into the position with the credit rating agencies that we need to be in."

And I'm sure Chatty Chuck took a huge pay cut and stopped wasting the company's profits on football stadium signage, too.  Wait!  What?  That didn't happen?

Well, there always selling another antique coal-fired electric generating station to captive customers in West Virginia!  I'm pretty sure they're going to try that next as a way to position themselves properly with the credit rating agencies.  Because even though FirstEnergy's money problems were of their own making, they want West Virginians to bail them out.  Again.

Pleasants, currently owned by a Mon Power sister company, Allegheny Energy Supply, is an aging, coal-fired plant that hasn’t been generating the returns investors want in Ohio’s deregulated energy marketplace. FirstEnergy CEO Charles E. Jones, on at least two occasions in 2016, told analysts the company wanted to shift plants like Pleasants that weren’t making investors enough money in Ohio into West Virginia’s regulated market, saying, “I think later this year, they’ll start (looking) at it seriously, and it’s up to (the West Virginia Public Service Commission) to decide, would Pleasants be the appropriate solution.”

And so that's what they did, issuing a narrow and completely opague Request for Proposals that could only be fulfilled by the sale of Pleasants to West Virginia regulated FirstEnergy subsidiaries Mon Power and Potomac Edison.  Once the transaction is completed, electric customers of the two local utilities will pay all the operational costs of the plant, along with a guaranteed profit.  That ought to cheer up the credit rating agencies, right?

Well, only if it happens.  Only if you allow it to happen.  What can you do?  Stay educated.  Stay tuned...