FirstEnergy wants West Virginia ratepayers to underwrite a 1,200-megawatt, $2.47 billion natural gas plant next door to the Fort Martin Power Station in Monongalia County — inside the same generation corridor as the Harrison Power Station. Before regulators sign off, someone needs to ask the obvious question: what happens to the two coal plants already standing on that ground?
Nobody is arguing against new generation. West Virginia needs it. The question in front of the Public Service Commission is narrower and harder: should regulators hand over billions of dollars in cost recovery and special ratepayer protections for a new gas plant before the utility has answered basic questions about it — and before anyone has reckoned with whether approving it as written undermines the very coal fleet state law now directs FirstEnergy to preserve?
House Bill 2014, signed into law in 2025, set capacity-factor and coal-supply standards for West Virginia’s coal-fired power plants. State law requires in-state coal plants to be upgraded and run indefinitely.
That standard is now the law of this state, and it should be the starting point for every regulatory decision that touches this corridor — including this one.
The gas plant proposal comes loaded with unresolved risk, and it’s worth walking through exactly what’s still missing.
Start with the wires. The Fort Martin-Harrison corridor already runs into transmission congestion today, before a single new gas turbine is built. Testifying before the Public Service Commission, WVCA Executive Vice President Jason Bostic warned that reduced operating levels at Fort Martin and Harrison could leave “no place for the electrons from those two coal plants to go” if the projected demand for the new gas facility never shows up.
That demand is speculative, full stop. The utilities lean heavily on a proposed 1,012-megawatt data center and a handful of prospective industrial customers to justify the project. But company witnesses admitted under questioning in PSC proceedings that not one of those customers has signed a binding agreement to buy power from the plant. This is a $2.47 billion bet being built on a stack of maybes — right next to two coal plants that are already generating power today, under contract, with no such uncertainty attached.
The financial case doesn’t hold up on its own, either. FirstEnergy officials testified they couldn’t say whether the gas project pencils out without a guaranteed ratepayer surcharge — the exact kind of backstop that tells you private capital wouldn’t touch this deal without someone else’s money underneath it. That someone else is the ratepayer, the same ratepayer already paying to keep Fort Martin and Harrison running.
The transmission math is just as shaky. Supporters expect much of the power tied to the separate MARL transmission project to originate from Fort Martin, Harrison and neighboring plants. But that line has run into serious public opposition across four counties, and its estimated construction costs have more than doubled — raising real questions about whether the infrastructure this whole plan depends on ever actually gets built.
And here’s the part that should stop everyone cold: FirstEnergy’s own long-range planning documents show the company expects to operate Fort Martin and Harrison only through 2035 — fifteen years short of the 2050 horizon West Virginia law requires. The same company asking ratepayers to backstop a new gas plant next door is, in its own internal planning, already writing off the two coal plants sitting on that same corridor.
Which raises a question FirstEnergy has yet to answer with anything more than a slide deck: where is the capital commitment to Fort Martin and Harrison themselves? If these plants are supposed to run through 2050, ratepayers deserve to see a real investment plan for the upgrades that will get them there — not a 2035 retirement date buried in the company’s own planning documents while it asks for billions toward a plant next door. FirstEnergy hasn’t committed a dollar or a timeline to modernizing the coal units it’s legally obligated to keep running. That commitment should come first. Approving new gas generation for a company that hasn’t shown its work on the plants it already owns gets the order of operations backward.
That is the plain math regulators are being asked to ignore. FirstEnergy wants approval and ratepayer protection for the gas plant now, on the strength of demand that doesn’t exist yet, while its own planning documents show Fort Martin and Harrison being phased out fifteen years ahead of what state law requires. Approve the gas plant on FirstEnergy’s terms, and the company gets exactly what it needs to justify retiring the coal fleet early — with ratepayers having already paid for its replacement.
Before consumers are asked to underwrite this project, FirstEnergy should have to show its work: how the gas plant complies with state law, how it protects the long-term viability of Fort Martin and Harrison specifically — including a firm capital commitment to keep them running through 2050 — and how it serves the public interest, not just the optimistic forecasts sitting in a slide deck that may never become reality.
West Virginia already decided that Fort Martin and Harrison run through 2050. FirstEnergy’s own gas plant application is the first real test of whether the company — and our regulators — intend to honor that.
And before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this is just another stone cast in the proverbial “coal versus gas” debate, the West Virginia Coal Association has not as much as raised a finger in opposition to the 5-6 other gas plants proposed to be developed in the state.
The distinction here is the protection for the First Energy proposed facility being paid for by consumers, many of whom are West Virginia miners, and the potential it may eventually cost them their jobs.
