The US regional transmission organization PJM has approved FirstEnergy's plan to shut down the 1,300 MW coal-fired Pleasants power plant in Willow Island, West Virginia (United States) in January 2019. The closure was announced in February 2018 as the facility was labelled as uneconomic and unable to stay competitive with low natural gas prices and newer coal plants. FirstEnergy was considering selling Pleasants to another company that would keep it running but the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rejected a bid to sell the plant to its company’s subsidiaries Mon Power and Potomac Edison for US$195m.
The power plant has been in operation for nearly 40 years and includes two coal-fired units of 650 MW each, completed at a cost of US$677m. The sale fits into a broader plan: in 2016, FirstEnergy announced the sale or closure of 2,471 MW of power generation operated in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Once the decommissioning of the Pleasants power plant is done, FirstEnergy will own 14,795 MW of power generation capacity across several US States (Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New Jersey, Virginia and Illinois).
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