The endangered Pleasants Power Station has taken another step toward potential new life under a different owner.
Energy Harbor, the power plant’s previous owner, has sent notification to PJM Interconnection that the plant shouldn’t be retired just yet.
That’s a significant yet incremental change from the notification that Energy Harbor provided more than a year ago — then indicating the power station would be retired and deactivated by June 1, 2023, which is today.
Instead, Energy Harbor is asking for an official change in generator status from “retired” to “mothballed,” which means the plant wouldn’t be producing power for now but that it can be maintained to do so in the future.
“So that’s a victory for us,” Pleasants County Commissioner Jay Powell said today on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
“You’ve gone from retired and never operating to the potential of firing back up in August. That’s a 180.”
Pleasants is a 1300 megawatt two-unit coal power plant located on the Ohio River near Belmont, Pleasants County. About 150 people work at the plant, which began operations in 1979.
Until late last year, it had been owned by Energy Harbor, which is pursuing a green energy strategy and transferred control of the plant to another company called Energy Transmission & Environmental Management.
ETEM had intended to shut down the plant, demolish the structures, remediate the property and prepare it for future redevelopment.
“Make no mistake about it, their goal was they thought they were buying the plant to take it down and sell it for scrap basically,” Powell said.
Even after the transfer, Energy Harbor has been running the plant to produce electricity — but that has been expected to cease at the start of this summer.
Two subsidiaries of FirstEnergy power company have been examining whether taking over Pleasants Power Station would make sense. The two power companies have started their assessment under the guidance of the Public Service Commission.
The power companies, in a filing last month, alluded to the possibility of yet another company potentially taking over the property.
Omnis Fuel Technologies has been in talks to take over the plant and generate energy using a hydrogen by product of Omnis’s graphite production operations.
Omnis is developing technologies that could be subject to benefits under the federal Inflation Reduction Act, like hydrogen and carbon sequestration.
The power companies wrote that if the Omnis and ETEM agreement goes forward, it would mean signing a purchase agreement by June 10 and closing a transaction before July 31.
July 31 is also the date that was provided to PJM to keep the plant’s status as “mothballed.”
“We believe we’ve got momentum now to have that plant operating, good Lord willing, later this summer,” Powell said.