Closures of Coal-Fired Power Plants Accelerate

SUGAR LAND--April 10, 2018--Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The coal-fired Power industry had a rotten first quarter. The first quarter included announcements that cut against coal from a wide range of asset owners, including units of FirstEnergy Corporation (NYSE:FE) (Akron, Ohio), CMS Energy Corporation (NYSE:CMS) (Jackson, Michigan), American Electric Power Company Incorporated (NYSE:AEP) (AEP) (Columbus, Ohio), PPL Corporation (NYSE:PPL) (Allentown, Pennsylvania), Talen Energy Corporation (Allentown, Pennsylvania), and Vectren Corporation (NYSE:VVC) (Evansville, Indiana), among others. Executives at several utilities, including AEP, PPL and Vectren, said they were closing coal plants to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Others, like FirstEnergy, were simply bowing to economics and closed plants that had been built decades earlier.