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The mammoth scandal surrounding a 2019 energy bailout appeared to creep closer on Thursday to the administration of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. FirstEnergy said in a deferred prosecution agreement that the man DeWine appointed to lead the Public Utility Commission of Ohio took a $4.3 million payment and then acted on behalf of the Akron-based power company instead of as the state’s top regulator. That man, Sam Randazzo, has resigned. But FirstEnergy also helped control a 501(c)(4) “dark-money” group started by a senior DeWine aide while he was still a FirstEnergy lobbyist, the agreement showed. The company passed a torrent...

...“FirstEnergy condemns the rise in violence across the country and stands firm in our support of the Asian-American community — which includes many of our employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders,” the company said in a tweet... As Dave Anderson of the Energy and Policy institute flagged over the weekend, that’s a far cry from the tone of FirstEnergy-financed advertising during the 2019 fight over House Bill 6 — a $1.3 billion energy bailout that morphed into one of the biggest corruption scandals in Ohio history. After Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bailout law, FirstEnergy and related interests funded a furious...

A FirstEnergy customer on Monday filed what could become a class-action lawsuit in an effort to make the electricity company refund customers for rate hikes that resulted from a billion-dollar nuclear bailout now at the center of a corruption scandal. The lawsuit filed by Jacob Smith, a North Royalton homeowner, accuses the Akron-based utility of committing civil racketeering by bribing law Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder to introduce House Bill 6 and then illegally bankrolling a dark-money campaign to pressure legislators into supporting the bill and fending off a ballot initiative to repeal it. The goal of the scheme was...

Three coal-fired power plants in West Virginia will soon stop generating electricity. The last day of power generation for FirstEnergy Corp.'s plants in Albright, Rivesville and Willow Island was scheduled for Saturday. FirstEnergy spokesman Mark Durbin said the plants would be deactivated by the end of the day. Officials say some workers likely will remain on the job for a short period. They will deactivate the plants and take care of permits and environmental regulations. The plants employ a total 210 workers. FirstEnergy also plans to close six coal-fired operations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Ohio-based utility attributes the...

Akron, Ohio, January 26, 2012 — FirstEnergy Corp. generation subsidiaries will retire six older coal-fired power plants located in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland by September 1, 2012. The decision to close the power plants is based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which were recently finalized, and other environmental regulations. The total capacity of the competitive plants that will be retired is 2,689 MW. Recently, these plants served mostly as peaking or intermediate facilities, generating, on average, about 10 percent of the electricity produced by the company over the past three years. The following plants...

Upset about FirstEnergy's pricey, hand-delivered light bulbs? You ain't seen nothing yetBy Kevin OBrien October 08, 2009, 3:59AM There was a time when you and I could be trusted to change a light bulb. In those days, powerful people who made weighty decisions understood that if a light bulb burned out, even the dimmest of us common folk would know enough to remove it from its socket, choose a suitable replacement and install it. Apparently all of the weighty decisions have been made, because powerful people have now worked their way down to telling us what kind of light bulb...

Two former Fort Monmouth workers, and the daughter of one of them, are accused of scheming to have government contractors provide no-show jobs for the daughter. Accused in an indictment made public today are 55-year-old Michael Rzeplinski, a former programs director for the General Services Administration and former Army supervisory engineer; 61-year-old Connie Davidson, a former G-S-A employee who lives with Rzeplinski in Red Bank, and her 33-year-old Kirsten Davidson of Red Bank. All three are charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Rzeplinski also faces two counts of mail fraud and three counts of tax evasion. Rzeplinski and...

NEVER FORGET QUOTE: Report: Major blackout could have been prevented By Edward Iwata, USA TODAY Front Page 4/6/2004 ...The vast blackout that left out tens of millions of people wihout power last summer could have been contained with stronger emergency actions and tougher regulation, energy investigators said Monday. ...The nation's largest-ever power outage, whch cost the economy up to $10 billion, forced Congress and regulators to look hard at what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. ...Legislation to overhaul the industry is stalled. But U.S. and Canadian energy regulators released a 220-page investigative report Monday that...

A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week. The bug in GE Energy's XA/21 system was discovered in an intensive code audit conducted by GE and a contractor in the weeks following the blackout, according to FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility where investigators say the blackout began. "It had never evidenced itself until that day," said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. "This fault was so deeply embedded, it took them weeks of pouring through millions of lines of code and data...

WASHINGTON - The nation's worst blackout began with three power line failures in Ohio and should have been contained by operators at FirstEnergy Corp., a three-month government investigation concluded Wednesday. The report by a U.S.-Canadian task force said the FirstEnergy operators did not respond properly, allowing the Aug. 14 outage to cascade, eventually cutting off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada. The task force also cited outdated procedures and shortcomings at a regional grid monitoring center in Indiana that kept officials there from grasping the emerging danger and helping FirstEnergy deal with it. "This blackout was...

A U.S.-Canadian government investigation of the massive Aug. 14 power outage in the Northeast singles out a series of operators' mistakes, computer failures, violations of grid rules and inadequate maintenance by FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron-based utility serving northern Ohio, as the primary causes of the largest blackout in North American history...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.It is a little-understood component of electricity, so arcane that engineers sometimes call it "imaginary power." But it was a shortage of this elusive force, largely unknown and unappreciated by the general public but critical to the operation of the nation's electrical grid, that experts now say probably set off the largest blackout in North American history on Aug. 14. Imaginary power, known to scientists as reactive power, cannot turn on lights or run toasters. Yet power plants and lines need it to create the conditions that allow hundreds of thousands of...

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week warned nuclear power plant operators to implement safeguards against the Slammer worm, which took systems at one such plant offline in January. The advisory details exactly how the Davis-Besse power plant in Ohio, operated by FirstEnergy Corp, had its "safety parameter display system" and "plant process computer" made unavailable for several hours by the worm. The news of the outage came to light after a report by SecurityFocus.com two weeks ago. It is particularly concerning as Slammer was preventable - it exploited a vulnerability in SQL Server that Microsoft Corp had issued a...

<p>The FBI found no evidence of any type of terrorism or criminal hacking in its investigation of the August power blackout in the Northeast, but the threat of such action remains a concern, the FBI's top counterterrorism official told a House committee Thursday.</p>

During the hour before the Aug. 14 power blackout, engineers in the control centre of an Ohio utility struggled to figure out why transmission lines were failing and complained that a computer failure was making it difficult to determine what was going on, transcripts of telephone communications released Wednesday show. At one point, an engineer at the Midwest grid managing organization asked engineers at the Ohio utility, FirstEnergy Corp., to explain why they had not responded to a line outage reported earlier and asked that they find out what was going on. "We have no clue. Our computer is giving...

Calls Show Pre-Blackout Utility Confusion WASHINGTON - During the hour before the Aug. 14 blackout, engineers in the control center of an Ohio utility struggled to figure out why transmission lines were failing and complained that a computer failure was making it difficult to determine what was going on, transcripts of telephone communications released Wednesday show. At one point, an engineer at the Midwest grid managing organization asked engineers at the Ohio utility, FirstEnergy Corp., to explain why they had not responded to a line outage reported sometime earlier and asked that they find out what was going on. "We...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Bush, looking hardly conscious, said last Thursday's blackout was a "wake-up call." His free-market energy secretary Spencer Abraham told CBS that upgrading the technology will cost $50 billion. Who will pay that? Not the guys who caused the shut-down. "Rate-payers, obviously, will pay the bill because they're the ones who benefit," said Abraham. With Abraham in the driver's seat of the so-called investigation into the blackout, the Bush guys can rest easy. Nothing bad is going to happen to them. But consider the following: FirstEnergy, the big Akron utility, is the focus of the probe so far because...

LOS ANGELES (Wireless Flash) -- A paranormal expert in Los Angeles thinks he may know the culprit to last week's blackout: E.T. Dr. Franklin Ruehl -- the resident UFO expert on Tom Green's new MTV talk show -- says it's not uncommon for UFOs to be seen hovering near power plants right before blackouts. Ruehl claims that prior to the big blackout in November, 1965, two pilots reported seeing UFOs near Indianapolis and Syracuse, New York. The phenomenon may be inadvertant but Ruehl says it's possible a UFO caused this year's blackout by trying to draw power from a provider...

Cauley Geller Announces Class Action Lawsuit Against FirstEnergy Corporation In Connection With the Largest Energy Blackout in HistoryMonday August 18, 5:08 pm ET NEW YORK, Aug. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- The law firm of Cauley Geller Bowman & Rudman, LLP announced today that it has filed a class action lawsuit in the Court of Common Pleas in Cuyahoga County, Ohio on behalf of all persons and entities residing in the United States who lost electrical power during the massive energy blackout that began on August 14, 2003. A copy of the complaint filed in this action is available from the Court,...

Investigators say it will be weeks before they know for sure what caused last week's massive power failure, but their principal focus is on the actions of one Ohio power company where the blackout seems to have started. Akron-based FirstEnergy, the largest utility in the country, has a long record of troubling safety, operational and financial problems, an ABCNEWS investigation has found. Unionized employees complain the company cut back on workers who maintain its transmission lines. In addition, its Ohio nuclear plant was shut down by federal regulators last year because of safety violations, including a football-sized hole in the...