NRG acquires clean energy retailer Green Mountain Energy

NRG Energy on Thursday announced that it would acquire clean energy retailer Green Mountain Energy for $350 million in cash.

The Austin, Texas-based company's retail franchise complements Princeton, N.J.-based NRG's sizeable portfolio of renewable power sources totaling more than 24,000 megawatts of capacity.

In a way, the company is the final step in NRG's preexisting development pipeline: NRG creates the energy, and Green Mountain sells it. (NRG already has a retail business in Texas named Reliant Energy; it's unclear if there will be any impact to this arm.)

As you might expect, Green Mountain has residential and commercial customers largely in Texas and the New York metropolitan area, who switch to the company on the promise of using cleaner energy.

NRG says Green Mountain will be run as a standalone business.

"Increasingly NRG, with our expanding portfolio of wind, solar and biomass initiatives, working with and through Green Mountain, is poised to become the clean energy provider of choice for Americans who want to make a difference for the environment," NRG CEO David Crane said in a statement.

The deal is expected to close by mid-November.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com