Recall that FirstEnergy Solutions – the subsidiary that owns and operates power plants and sells power to customers in the competitive market – declared bankruptcy last year. The company made lots of bad business decisions, particularly by buying more coal-fired power plants just as the falling cost of natural gas made them uneconomic. So Jones appeared to tacitly admit that FirstEnergy Solutions wasn’t very good at operating power plants.

Yet the CEO, claiming that FirstEnergy’s growth strategy now “focuses on re-building and upgrading long-distance transmission lines,” seems to forget that the company also has a history of not doing transmission well.

About 15 years ago, FirstEnergy’s mistakes led to the biggest blackout in North American history, which forced 50 million people to lose power, contributed to at least 11 deaths, and cost an estimated $6 billion.  

To quote Alanis Morissette, “Isn’t it ironic?”

Jones’ preference for transmission projects may reflect what a new report found: Utilities earn billions of extra dollars on such long-distance wires because the companies face virtually no competition and the projects receive little scrutiny.

Conservative politicians also lament FirstEnergy’s return to the bailout trough. In the Columbus Dispatch, Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s former Republican Secretary of State, calls it “corporate cronyism” or “pay-to-play.”

The pay was FirstEnergy giving $737,000 to Ohio candidates. The play was the legislature, on its first day, creating a standing committee on power generation to advance a nuclear bailout and help out FirstEnergy.

The conservative Blackwell says the utility giant offered “sizable campaign donations to candidates hoping to gather up political allies to support its demand for $300 million a year to keep its plants operational.” He argues the scheme will “saddle Ohio’s electricity customers with hundreds of millions in costs they don’t need to pay.”

He concludes: “Implementing bad public policy based on political donations is crony capitalism at its worst. Ohio has had enough of that.”

Well said.

Not every utility begs constantly. Consider the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which recently decided to close two old coal plants and save its customers some $1 billion.

This decision demonstrates the power of finance over politics since the Trump administration—which tore up the Paris Climate Accord and changed federal rules to increase both costs and pollution to American consumers—appointed four of TVA’s seven directors.

In a Frank Capra moment, TVA embraced the “great principles” of free markets and “standing up for the little guy.” Here’s hoping Ohio officials also will do the right thing.

FirstEnergy Solutions, the bankrupt power provider, has closed nearly half of its coal capacity, including units 1 and 2 at the giant Bruce Mansfield facility in Beaver County, PA.

Yet to explain such actions, a utility spokesman – in classic corporate garbled-speak –claimed that the recent deactivations were made because those units “had been operating at extremely limited capacity since January 2018.”

As comic Keegan-Michael Kay might translate: “These old and dirty power plants were losing tons of money, and we’d close a lot more of them, and save consumers a lot more money, if we weren’t getting a $600-million bailout.”