Coal Plant Won’t Pay Its Rent, but Can Pay Joe Manchin – By Molly Taft (Gizmodo) / February 16, 2022
One of Senator Joe Manchin’s biggest financial windfalls is also late on rent—very late.
E&E News reported this week that West Virginia’s Grant Town Power Plant, which is a major customer of Manchin’s coal waste business Enersystems, hasn’t paid rent in 10 years, as part of a drawn-out legal battle with its landlord that reached the West Virginia Supreme Court this month. That hasn’t stopped the plant from generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for Manchin in recent years. Funny how that works!
The situation between Grant Town’s owner, American Bituminous Power Partners LP (cutely referred to as “Ambit”), and its landlord is complicated, to say the least. The plant is on the site of an old coal mine in West Virginia, owned by a company called Horizon Ventures. Ambit and Horizon signed a hefty, complex lease nearly three decades ago. Part of the payment they worked out for the plant’s rent was based on how much on-site fuel it uses: Ambit would pay more in rent to Horizon the more on-site fuel it used for power.
Ambit, however, has been powering the Grant Town plant primarily with off-site coal waste (called, hilariously, “gob”) that it buys from Manchin’s company, Enersystems. That’s led to a dispute with Horizon over how much rent the Grant Town plant actually owes; Horizon sued in 2013, and the suit has dragged on since then. The court has ordered rent payments stopped as the suit proceeds, an Ambit official told E&E—meaning that the Grant Town plant hasn’t paid rent for nearly a decade. Must be nice to be a coal waste-fired power plant.
