NextEra Energy said Wednesday that its recent acquisition of transmission developer GridLiance furthers its strategy to be “North America’s leading competitive transmission provider.”
The Florida-based company closed its purchase of GridLiance last month, giving it ownership of regulated assets in 10 states and six RTOs. FERC last month approved the $660 million acquisition of GridLiance’s transmission operations in CAISO, MISO and SPP. (See FERC Approves NextEra Purchase of GridLiance.)
“We love GridLiance,” NextEra Energy Partners President John Ketchum told analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call. He compared NextEra’s transmission presence to a doughnut, saying, “We had a hole in the middle. This gets us in the SPP and MISO. We’re now a member as a [transmission owner]. It’s strategic. It’s going to help enable a lot of new renewable development for us, so it lines up really well with where we see renewable growth opportunities going forward.”
“GridLiance … is an excellent complement to our existing operations and further expands NextEra Energy’s regulated business through the addition of attractive rate regulated assets,” CFO Rebecca Kujawa said. “I expect that we’ll grow the business through both going forward as well continued efforts on the development side. … We do think there are lot of opportunities to improve how transmission is sited and built across the U.S., and we’re optimistic that this administration and this FERC will start to focus on those.”
NextEra reported first-quarter earnings of $1.67 billion ($0.84/share), compared to $421 million ($0.21/share) a year earlier. The company’s adjusted earnings of $0.67/share beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.60/share.
NextEra Energy Resources’ earnings jumped 13% during the quarter. The renewable development subsidiary added an additional 1.75 GW of projects to its backlog, including 190 MW of solar paired with 100 MW of battery storage.
The company still has its sights set on Santee Cooper, the South Carolina state-owned utility that is loaded with billions of dollars in debt after abandoning the V.C. Summer nuclear project. State lawmakers last year rejected a purchase offer from NextEra for the utility, but the Senate’s president recently asked interested parties to return with updated proposals.
“We’ve been pretty clear that we remain interested,” CEO Jim Robo said, acknowledging he had sent a letter to Senate President Harvey Peeler. “We have a very strong bid out there. Fundamentally, our bid stands and we’re ready to get going and negotiating with the state on the sale.”
Robo said it is clear that the state’s best option is to “demunicipalize Santee Cooper and get it in the hands of an entity like ourselves that will run it in a best-in-class way.”
NextEra’s share price lost $2.56 Wednesday on what as an up day for the markets. The stock closed at $77.97, a 3.2% drop.
