FirstEnergy Solutions (FES), the bankrupt competitive generation division of Ohio-based FirstEnergy, informed the PJM Interconnection this week that it plans to close all of its remaining coal-fired generation in Ohio and Pennsylvania, some 4GW in total, by June 2022.
The company had already announced it would close its 4 GW of nuclear capacity and would close four Ohio coal units in 2020 and sell or close a 1,300-MW coal plant in West Virginia by January 1, 2019.
FirstEnergy’s most recent announcement to PJM says it will shut the 2,490-MW Bruce Mansfield plant in Pennsylvania by June 1, 2021; three units, with 1,490-MW of nameplate capacity at the W. H. Sammis plant in Ohio by June 1, 2022, a 24-MW coal unit at the Eastlake plant in Ohio by June 1, 2021, an a 13-MW diesel generator at Sammis on June 1, 2021.
FES has been bleeding money in the competitive PJM wholesale market for several years, as the elderly nukes and coal units are unable to compete with newer, more efficient gas-fired units in the giant competitive market. Unable to match bids from gas capacity, FirstEnergy has been seeking a bailout from the Trump administration to keep the coal and nukes operating. Trump campaigned on helping out a staggering coal industry, which he blamed on federal environmental regulations, not market forces.
The first approach, launched early in the new administration last year – a proposed rulemaking from the Department of Energy to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to put a thumb on the PJM scale because of the “resilience” of coal and nuclear generation – failed. FERC, with three Trump appointees, voted against the DOE proposal 5-0.
FirstEnergy’s latest ploy is a plan under consideration at DOE to use a 1950s law to keep the plants in service for “national security” reasons under an emergency order. So far, that plan seems to be stuck somewhere in the bowels of DOE, while attracting criticism from left and right.
FES said its decisions on the plant closures could depend “on the timing of any federal policy action….” It says it doesn’t want to close the units, but can’t continue to run them at a loss.
Mary Anne Hitt of the Sierra Club said, “They should not be asking the federal government to force taxpayers and electricity customers to spend tens of billions of dollars to bail out their old, expensive coal plants that can no longer compete in PJM’s marketplace.
“FirstEnergy Solutions could have planned for a responsible transition to clean energy, but instead they ran to the edge of a cliff in the hopes of receiving a coal bailout from their customers or Donald Trump, and in doing so they’ve left their workers in the lurch.”
Dan Sawmiller, Ohio energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he suspects the announcement was timed pressure DOE and PJM over the emergency order. “We’re talking about billions of dollars being used to bail out a failing industry, when these closures are inevitable and irreversible,” he said. “There are a lot better uses for that money, not to mention the impact on the environment.”
PJM must review the FES plan and determine if any of the units are needed for grid reliability in the eastern wholesale market, covering Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. PJM has had no comment on the FES announcement.
— Kennedy Maize