Akron, Ohio, February 8, 2012 — FirstEnergy Corp. announced today that its Monongahela Power Co. unit will be retiring three older coal-fired power plants located in West Virginia by September 1, 2012.

The decision to close the plants is based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which were recently finalized, and other environmental regulations.

The following plants will be retired: Albright Power Station, Willow Island Power Station and Rivesville Power Station. In total, 105 employees will be directly affected.

The total capacity of these regulated plants is 660 MW, about 3 percent of FirstEnergy's total regulated and competitive generation portfolio. Recently, these plants served mostly as peaking facilities, generating, on average, less than 1 percent of the electricity produced by FirstEnergy over the past three years.

Mon Power recently completed a yearlong study of its older, unscrubbed regulated coal-fired units to determine the potential impact of changes in environmental regulations.

It was determined that additional investments to implement MATS and other environmental rules would make these plants even less likely to be dispatched. As a result, the decision was made to retire these West Virginia plants rather than continue operations.

This follows FirstEnergy's announcement last month that its competitive generation subsidiaries would retire six older, coal-fired power plants located in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland by September 1, 2012. Read that story here.

All of the recently announced plant retirements are subject to review for reliability impacts, if any, by PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization that controls the area where they are located.