While giving no indications that his own company plans to put a “for sale” sign in front of its headquarters, Mayo Shattuck, CEO of Maryland-based Constellation Energy, last Tuesday told a gathering of investment professionals that he expects consolidation in the overall power industry to accelerate in the years ahead.

“Right now, it’s hard for me to believe that the value proposition in being acquired is going to be greater than the value proposition of what we see over the next five years,” Shattuck said in an appearance before the Deutsche Bank Electric Power Conference in New York City.

“It comes back a little bit to where we are in time and what our size is,” he said. “A company has only so many doublings in its history. How many times can you create value that accretes to the shareholder?”

Shattuck said that his company is “really trying to be thoughtful about picking a strategy that creates the most shareholder value in the period of time that we have visibility.”

More broadly, over the course of the next five years, “I think consolidation will accelerate and that you’ll begin to see people making moves, but from that standpoint, it’s probably going to be driven by those people who really don’t have the same kind of growth prospects and shareholder proposition that I think that we have at this point.”

Constellation recently announced the completion of the acquisition of the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant, a 495 MW facility located north of Rochester, NY, from Rochester Gas and Electric Corp, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Energy East.

The final purchase price, reflecting certain adjustments as specified in the original agreement, is estimated to be $408 million, excluding $21 million for nuclear fuel and an expected post-closing adjustment of $21 million in exchange for an equal amount of additional pension assets. Additionally, the final purchase price is subject to certain adjustments and true-ups following the initial financial closing.

Shattuck told the Deutsche Bank conference that Constellation expects to complete a 17% upgrade of the Ginna plant during a 2006 fall refueling outage. Upon completion of that upgrade, the plant will have a rated capacity of 580 MW.

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