Thanks for the earnings call fun today, FirstEnergy. It gave Patience and I an excuse to dine on fancy sandwiches and cornichons, drink Raging Bitch, make certain hand gestures at the voices coming out of my laptop, and laugh at all the stupid things your NEOs said. And a fun time was had by all... at least on this side of the internet connection!
"FirstEnergy's third quarter net income this year tumbled to about half of what it was a year ago," read the lead of The Plain Dealer's pre-call story. I had to quickly whip up a side of schadenfreude to serve with lunch!
Tony the Trickster mentioned that, after recent closings, his "fleet" of generators is now about the same size as FirstEnergy's "fleet" was at the time it merged with and swallowed up the former Allegheny Energy. This wouldn't be the first time I pondered if the merger's sole purpose was to carve up the Allegheny carcass, saving that which benefited FirstEnergy and tossing the rest on the rubbish heap. When does the sale of troubled Allegheny distribution subs begin, now that FirstEnergy has accomplished its evil plan to raise cash by sucking the lifeblood out of Mon Power/Potomac Edison and leaving a dried up, debt-laden shell that no longer provides service to its customers?
"FirstEnergy's third quarter net income this year tumbled to about half of what it was a year ago," read the lead of The Plain Dealer's pre-call story. I had to quickly whip up a side of schadenfreude to serve with lunch!
Tony the Trickster mentioned that, after recent closings, his "fleet" of generators is now about the same size as FirstEnergy's "fleet" was at the time it merged with and swallowed up the former Allegheny Energy. This wouldn't be the first time I pondered if the merger's sole purpose was to carve up the Allegheny carcass, saving that which benefited FirstEnergy and tossing the rest on the rubbish heap. When does the sale of troubled Allegheny distribution subs begin, now that FirstEnergy has accomplished its evil plan to raise cash by sucking the lifeblood out of Mon Power/Potomac Edison and leaving a dried up, debt-laden shell that no longer provides service to its customers?
For example, we have reduced the size and mix of the fleet by closing and selling competitive units. Last month, we closed the Hatfield and Mitchell Power plants and we expect to complete the sale of certain hydro assets later this year. In addition, we completed the Harrison and Pleasants transfer this quarter. Once the RMR units are deactivated, our competitive fleet will be a little more than 13,000 megawatts. This is about the same size as our fleet prior to the Allegheny merger, but it's a much stronger platform of units, more environmentally controlled and more efficient overall.
It's all about Tony's "plan" to pull his ass out of the fire. It never was about serving customers, or any of that other dreck two of the WV PSC Commissioners wanted to believe.
Let's turn to an update on the financial plan that we introduced in February. Through a series of actions this year, we have made significant progress towards completing the plan, strengthening our credit metrics and reducing our risk profile.
This financial plan, which is now virtually complete, successfully improves the balance sheet at our competitive and regulated businesses and enhance liquidity in a very short period of time.
Tony's next great plan is to plop his "spend" into regulated transmission investment accounts that earn risk-free, high returns.
Last week, our Board of Directors approved as a part of our energizing the future program, a new multiyear $2.8 billion incremental investment in a transmission reliability excellence plan. The plan includes additional transmission investments above current plans, which are expected to be about $500 million in 2014, growing to about $700 million in 2015 and about $800 million in both 2016 and 2017. This program will begin with investment primarily in ATSI, but will ultimately extend throughout our service area. We currently expect to fund these investments with a combination of debt and equity. These projects include rebuilding lines and equipment to improve reliability and reduce future maintenance costs, enhancing and expanding communication networks to harden the system and increasing system capacity to meet the service level and reliability requirements of our customers.
This announcement turned the analysts on the call into curious monkeys who wanted to know all about tricky Tony's tantalizing transmission targets, but that wiley old geezer strung them along, talking about rebuilding lower voltage lines that don't require regulatory approval and said he would talk more about it at an upcoming EEI conference. Tony also said that the company is primarily looking to "spend" inside its footprint and not looking for projects that have long lead times with respect to either approval processes or likely construction processes. Because they learned their lesson with PATH? Someone's been paying attention in class! But he forgot to tell them about FirstEnergy's proposal for a project to solve PJM's Artificial Island issues, and any lingering ratepayer-funded PATH assets that may still be kicking around. Do you think the curious analysts were only pretending to be that clueless?
In response to a question about coal costs, Donny started talking about pulling his lever. I'll spare you the hand gestures that instigated. And before the laughter had died down, Tony started talking about the possibility of things being soft down the road...
I love my job.
In response to a question about coal costs, Donny started talking about pulling his lever. I'll spare you the hand gestures that instigated. And before the laughter had died down, Tony started talking about the possibility of things being soft down the road...
I love my job.
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