... is that those reservoirs can get bought and sold, which is what's happening right now in Sullivan County, according to the Times Herald-Record. Four reservoirs currently owned by Alliance Energy are being sold to a privately equity group with Goldman Sachs ties that has never owned or operated a hydro-electric power plant before. And although the nearby towns of Bethel and Thompson don't know many details, they dislike Alliance so much that they're happy about it anyway:
While the towns want more information about the sale, officials wouldn't necessarily consider new owners of the reservoirs a bad thing. "Anything would be better than Alliance," Thompson Supervisor Tony Cellini said.
Alliance ruffled feathers last year when it sucked enough water out of the Toronto reservoir to strand all the boat launches on dry land. At the time, David Knudsen, who runs a real estate blog about Sullivan County, did some citizen-journalism on the issue:
[T]he once grand 800 acre lake seems like a puddle of its former self. I didn't take the photo on the left above on the road to the reservoir, but standing about 50 feet from the 'shore' on what was the lake bottom last year. The "road" has been rutted in by boaters towing their boats from the public access point on Moscoe Road to the receding water's edge. The photo on the right shows floating docks belonging to homeowners at the Chapin Estate lying like beached whales on the dry lake bottom.
But Alliance's attempt to sell the reservoirs doesn't necessarily mean that it will no longer be running them. According to a Sullivan County Democrat article from last week, there's a chance that the company will continue to operate the reservoirs on behalf of its new masters, a suite of Eagle Creek companies owned by Hudson Clean Energy Partners:
There is speculation that Alliance will remain as operator of the hydroelectric facilities, as Eagle Creek has no apparent experience with such.
