Meridian reports lower half-year profit
Meridian Energy has reported a lower profit, largely due to changes in the value of financial hedging instruments, but the company says higher retail and wholesale sales drove an increase in operating earnings.
Net profit was $191 million for the six months ended December compared with $201m a year ago.
Revenue rose 44% to $2.1 billion, supported by higher generation revenue as wholesale prices rose, and as sales improved.
Generation fell 4%, with the company highlighting transformer reliability issues, with reduced capacity and its West Wind farm and the Manapōuri power station due to outages.
Chief executive Neal Barclay said the outages presented challenges for Meridian. “Our maintenance teams are working extremely hard to bring as much capacity as possible on-line before this winter.”
Barclay said he was pleased with how the retail business performed in what was an “extremely competitive” market.
“This is a solid result overall, but the stand-out is a 3% lift in retail sales volumes over the same period last year. This increase was driven by the agribusiness and large business segments, up 9% and 6% respectively,” he said.
Meridian said it had also made “strong progress” in building its Harapaki wind farm in Hawke's Bay and the Ruakākā grid-scale battery north of Auckland.
It said it had 20 turbines commissioned at Harapaki, with the project on track for full power by September 2024.
Meridian said Ruakākā battery remained on track and “should be operational by the end of the year”.
The company said hydro inflows were 95% of average during the first six months of the financial year, and catchment storage levels were slightly below average at the end of January.