FirstEnergy’s Future Looked Rosy…in the Past
It’s hard to believe it was less than five years ago that FirstEnergy was sitting pretty and flaunting it. But that’s the reason Mad Money host Jim Cramer invited FirstEnergy's then-CEO, Tony Alexander, on the show in 2011 to discuss how the utility would be able to easily meet new environmental regulations and likely come out on top. It was the perfect opportunity for the CEO to brag about the utility’s astute ability to “look at where the future seemed to be going.”
He even declared confidently: “We are in a very good position from a generation fleet standpoint to take advantage of what may occur in the future.”
The FirstEnergy of today is far from “taking advantage” of what’s happening, unless we’re referring to taking advantage of its customers.
Instead, we find a utility saddled with bad business decisions in the form of coal investments that can’t keep up in the marketplace. In the interview, Alexander said he’d “like to see the economy come back [and] the markets improve,” presumably so FirstEnergy could make bank. But now that both of those things have happened, the utility is pleading for the PUCO’s help to keep its operations alive.
The Mad Money segment was labeled as talking with the FirstEnergy CEO about “Powering its Business and America.” It seems the utility is struggling to do either these days.
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