Monongahela Power Company

Monongahela Power Company is a subsidiary of Allegheny Energy. Incorporated in Ohio in 1924, the company services approximately 378,600 residential and commercial customers West Virginia. Monongahela Power, along with West Penn Power and Potomac Edison, comprise the Allegheny Power arm of Allegheny Energy. It has power plants with 2,806 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity.

In 2006 American Electric Power, through its Columbus Southern Power (CSP) utility subsidiary, completed the purchase of Monongahela Power Company´s Ohio operations. "The purchase price was approximately $46 million. In addition, CSP will pay Allegheny $10 million associated with the termination of certain litigation. Through the purchase, AEP acquired 29,000 Monongahela Power customers in six southeastern Ohio counties and all transmission and distribution assets located in Ohio serving those customers."

In February 2010, FirstEnergy announced plans to buy Allegheny Energy for $4.7 billion in stock to create one of the largest U.S. utilities. The merger was approved and closed on February 25, 2011.

Proposed coal unit closures
On February 8, 2012, FirstEnergy announced that its Monongahela Power Company (Mon Power) subsidiary would be retiring three older coal-fired power plants located in West Virginia by September 1, 2012: Albright Power Station, Willow Island Power Station, and Rivesville Power Station. The total capacity of the regulated plants is 660 megawatts (MW), about 3 percent of FirstEnergy’s total regulated and competitive generation portfolio. Recently, the plants had served mostly as peaking facilities, generating around less than 1 percent of the electricity produced by FirstEnergy over the past three years. The company said the decision to close the plants was based on the EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that were recently finalized, and other environmental regulations.

Coal Ash
Monongahela's Harrison plant was among those examined in a May 2009 study by the the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice, which laid out suppressed findings of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on coal ash. The study showed that EPA officials, under the Bush Administration, did not make public an October 2002 coal ash study that outlined increased risks as high as 1 in 50 additional cancer cases. EPA later published some of the data in an August 2007 study, but even then the agency report left out some key information about additional dangers to aquatic ecosystems and wildlife from toxic metals leaching out of unlined or inadequately lined coal-ash dumps.

Contact Details
Monongahela Power Company 1310 Fairmont Ave. Fairmont, WV 26554 Tel. 304-366-3000 Fax 724-830-5284 Website: http://www.alleghenypower.com

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