Starwood Energy Seals $760M Deal with NextEra

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Armando Pimentel

Philadelphia—NextEra Energy Resources LLC will soon sell its only two natural gas-fired power plants in Pennsylvania, but the company will have three quarters of a billion dollars to fill the hole left in its portfolio. A NextEra subsidiary has signed on to sell the Marcus Hook Energy Center facilities, located 20 miles outside Philadelphia in Marcus Hook, Pa., to an investment affiliate of Starwood Energy Group Global LLC, for $760 million.

Marcus Hook 790 and Marcus Hook 50 occupy the same site along the Delaware River within the Sunoco Marcus Hook Refinery, but they’re hardly twin plants. It’s all in the numbers. Marcus Hook 790 is a 790-megawatt combined-cycle plant, utilizing gas and steam to create electricity, while Marcus Hook 50 is a 50-megawatt facility that creates power solely through the use of a gas turbine. NextEra acquired Marcus Hook 50 in 1999, 12 years after the plant commenced operations. Marcus Hook 790, however, was NextEra’s own development; the company completed the $300 million project in 2004.

“This transaction is part of our ongoing strategy to further optimize our power generation assets, while recycling capital into our growing long-term contracted asset portfolio,” Armando Pimentel, president & CEO of NextEra Energy Resources, said in a prepared statement. In tandem with the release of the Starwood Energy news, NextEra announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 100 percent of the equity of Energy Future Holdings Corp., now emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and certain of its direct and indirect subsidiaries, including the company’s 80 percent indirect interest in Oncor Electric Delivery Co. The price tag on that deal is $18.4 billion.