FirstEnergy Announces the Retirement of the W.H. Sammis Coal Plant

COLUMBUS, OH -- Today, FirstEnergy Solutions announced the retirement of their W.H. Sammis coal-burning units 5-7 on June 1, 2022 and their diesel plant at Sammis on June 1, 2021, accounting for more than 1,600 megawatts of coal power going offline in Ohio within three years.

The retirement announcement comes on the heels of the Trump Administration’s proposed rollback of the Clean Power Plan last week and efforts by the Department of Energy (DOE), Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and others to advance various federal coal bailout packages, which would prop up expensive coal and nuclear plants in the PJM region. A federal bailout of this magnitude would require people and businesses to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up plants that are long past their useful life and have a significant track record of polluting their surrounding communities.

Retirement of the W.H. Sammis coal power plant would save 163 lives, avoid 268 heart attacks, 2,506 asthma attacks a year, and account for a total health care costs of $77 million.

In response, Neil Waggoner, State Representative for Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in Ohio, released the following statement:

"FirstEnergy should simply retire these uneconomic coal plants and help affected workers and communities through the transition, rather than suggest they could be saved by an expensive federal bailout. Time and again, it’s been shown that there are no reliability concerns as aging uneconomic coal plants retire. We will continue to monitor these retirements to ensure workers are taken care of, and that FES does not walk away from its environmental cleanup obligations.”