Attorneys general from nine states and the District of Columbia are urging U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry to reject FirstEnergy Solutions’ request for relief from the Trump Administration, calling the company’s request “legally flawed” and “a grave abuse of the Federal Power Act.”
“Abusing Section 202(c) [of the Federal Power Act] in the manner requested by FirstEnergy would set a dangerous precedent that threatens all of our states, including those located outside of PJM’s service territory,” according to the letter, signed by attorneys general from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virgnia, Washington, and Washington, D.C.
The seven-page letter is accompanied by a 59-page document. The attorneys general go on to claim FirstEnergy has failed to prove there is an emergency, and maintain that fulfilling FES’ request “would undermine competitive regional power markets, burden customers with excessive costs, undercut state energy laws and policies, and exacerbate pollution and public health harms.”
A recent study issued by an FES consultant maintains the opposite, claiming the region’s air pollution — including emissions of climate-altering carbon dioxide — will become much worse if those four nuclear plants are taken out of service for good.
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FES is a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. which now owns the Davis-Besse nuclear plant east of Toledo, the Perry nuclear plant east of Cleveland, the twin-reactor Beaver Valley nuclear complex west of Pittsburgh, and several coal-fired power plants and other electrical generation facilities formerly owned by the parent company.
On March 29, just before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 31, FES called upon Mr. Perry to issue an emergency order requiring PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for a 13-state region that includes Ohio and Pennsylvania, to secure long-term agreements from nuclear and coal-fired power plants and to compensate their owners “for the full benefits they provide to energy markets and the public at large, including fuel security and diversity.”
PJM’s immediate response was that there is no issue of reliability, and no immediate emergency. It further stated the region “has adequate power supplies and healthy reserves in operation today, and resources are more diverse than they have ever been.”
It later agreed, though, that the fuel-security issue is worth examining more closely because this region and America in general is becoming more dependent on potentially vulnerable natural gas pipelines now that the modern era of fracking has made natural gas much more popular as a feedstock for power plants.
Barring a buyer or a bailout, Davis-Besse will close by May 31, 2020, and the other three reactors owned by FES will close by Oct. 31, 2021, under the company’s published timetable.
Contact Tom Henry at thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
First Published May 10, 2018, 10:47 p.m.
