Fundraising

Talen offloads 399MW coal plant

The Riverstone-backed power producer has completed the sale of CP Crane in Maryland to an affiliate of Avenue Capital Group.

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Talen Energy, a spin-off of US utility PPL Corporation backed by private equity firm Riverstone Holdings, has completed the sale of a 399-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant near Baltimore, Maryland, 

The disposal of CP Crane comes as Talen seeks to comply with an order issued in December 2014 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

The FERC order, which was a prerequisite for PPL and Riverstone to create Talen Energy, requires the company to divest sufficient capacity to alleviate market power concerns in the eastern Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland region of PJM.

“The various asset packages that we proposed to sell were all between 1,300 and 1,400MW and all were determined by FERC to address the potential market power issues,” a spokesperson for Talen Energy told Infrastructure Investor.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania-based company did not disclose financial details of the deal other than to say that “proceeds of the sale were not material.”

CP Crane is the second of three asset sales Talen Energy has announced to comply with the FERC order. The first was the sale of Ironwood, a 778MW natural gas-fired combined cycle power plant in Lebanon, Pennsylvania to TransCanada for $654 million. 

The third sale, yet to be concluded, is that of two hydroelectric plants in Pennsylvania:  Holtwood (249MW) and Lake Wallenpaupack (44MW), which Talen Energy said it would be selling to Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners for $860 million. “We are still working through the approval process for that sale,” the spokesperson said. Completion of that sale is expected in late March.  

Officially launched on 1 June 2015, Talen Energy began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the following day.

Established in 2000 and based in New York, Riverstone is an investment firm focusing on the energy and power sectors. It has raised $32 billion of equity capital since inception and has committed approximately that amount to over 120 investments in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.