FirstEnergy Corp.

FirstEnergy Corp. is an American regulated electric utility that transmits and distributes electricity to approximately six million customers across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Maryland, generating $15.1 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. The company is one of the largest pure-play transmission and distribution operators in PJM, the nation's largest regional transmission organization, and after a multi-year campaign to exit competitive generation and resolve legacy regulatory controversies, it enters 2026 with a clean operating model organized around five state-aligned business units and a $36 billion five-year capital plan.

This is a story about a utility that has largely finished reinventing itself and is now asking whether the pace of investment its system demands can be sustained without exhausting the political consent of the customers who pay for it. FirstEnergy controls roughly 32% of the average residential bill in its deregulated states — the rest is generation cost pass-through — but the absolute dollar increases from its capital program are arriving at a moment when governors and commissioners across its footprint are newly vocal about affordability. The file turns on a single question: whether FirstEnergy's regulatory relationships and below-peer rate structure give it enough running room to compound rate base at 10% for the rest of the decade without a backlash that forces the plan down.

The West Virginia generation opportunity and an expanding data-center pipeline add genuine optionality, but the base case does not need them. The base case needs formula rates to keep working, rate cases to keep settling, and customers to keep accepting that reliability costs money. Those three things have held for three years. Whether they hold for five more is what this report examines.