Riverstone Holdings LLC’s Talen Energy Corp. placed a collection of power plants into bankruptcy, planning to hand control of the business to bondholders after a cash crunch caused by surging natural-gas prices last year, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A group of unsecured bondholders have agreed to provide $1.65 billion in equity financing to Talen Energy Supply LLC, the entity in bankruptcy, to take control of its fleet of nuclear-, gas- and coal-fired facilities, one of the largest in the country, court papers say. Bondholders would also convert $1.4 billion in debt to equity, while the company’s $2.9 billion in secured debt would be paid in full. The Riverstone-backed company faced a liquidity crunch stemming from a gas-price rally last year that forced the company to post additional collateral under energy hedging contracts, according to court papers filed on Monday by the company’s financial adviser, Ryan Leland Omohundro. Talen operates 18 generation facilities with a collective capacity of roughly 13,000 megawatts, Mr. Omohundro said. Talen kept out of bankruptcy a cryptocurrency mining operation being constructed located close to the company’s Susquehanna, Pa., nuclear plant. Called Cumulus Growth, the project comprises a digital currency mining center as well as data centers and renewable energy and battery storage projects, the filing shows. Scheduled to begin mining bitcoin in the third quarter, it is one of several partnerships between crypto ventures and nuclear plant operators that aims to address environmental criticisms of bitcoin production by linking them to carbon-free nuclear generation.
