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National Energy & Gas Transmission has agreed to sell its stake in 12 power plants -- including one in the Capital Region -- and a natural gas pipeline to a Goldman Sachs subsidiary for $656 million.
NEGT, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year, chose the bid by GS Power Holdings II over a $558 million price proposed by Denali Power, a company formed by affiliates of ArcLight Capital Partners and Caithness Energy.
The sale includes Selkirk Cogen, a natural gas-fired cogeneration facility at General Electric Co.'s plastics plant in Selkirk, and Madison Wind, a wind farm in Madison County.
It does not involve the power plant NGET built in Athens, Greene County. Last month, that facility became the property of a 16-bank lending consortium led by French bank Societe Generale Group. The Athens plant, which can produce enough electricity to power about 1 million homes, was completed in 2003.
The deal with GS Power Holdings, announced Wednesday, is subject to approval by a Maryland bankruptcy judge. The sale is expected to close in the first quarter of 2005.
The plants up for sale are mostly natural gas and coal with a generating capacity of more than 2,500 megawatts.
They also include Carneys Point and Logan in New Jersey; Hermiston in Oregon; Scrubgrass, Northampton and Panther Creek in Pennsylvania; Cedar Bay and Indiantown in Florida; MASSPOWER in Massachusetts; and Plains End in Colorado.
Goldman Sachs already owns interests in nine of the plants.
NEGT had agreed to sell its stake in the Hermiston plant to Perennial Power Co., a subsidiary of Japan's Sumitomo Corp. for $50 million. That plant will be removed from the Goldman Sachs deal if the Perennial deal goes through. writer Sara Clemence contributed to this story.
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