A US federal judge has ruled in favor of American Electric Power, awarding the company $123 million in its contract dispute with Tractebel, a unit of French utility Suez SA.
Tractebel is said to have breached the terms of an agreement originally signed in 2000 in which it agreed to purchase 620-megawatts of power annually from AEP for 20 years.
AEP would not have gone forward with the construction of the project without a buyer for the large quantities of electricity that were not needed by the chemical complex, said Michael Morris, AEP’s chairman, president and CEO. Tractebel’s decision to breach the contract damaged AEP. The court obviously recognized that.