Two of Western Australia’s biggest power stations have earned after-tax profits of around $37 million in the 12 months to March, despite one of the generators being out of action, according to the annual report of their part owner.
Two of Western Australia’s biggest power stations have earned after-tax profits of around $37 million in the 12 months to March, despite one of the generators being out of action, according to the annual report of their part owner.
Summit Southern Cross Power Holdings, which is owned by Tokyo-based Sumitomo Corporation, has a 49.9 per cent share of Bluewaters Power, which operates coal generators in Collie, and the same share of NewGen Power Kwinana, which runs gas turbines.
Kansai Electric Power holds the remaining slice of Bluewaters, while Infrastructure Capital Group is the venture partner at NewGen.
Summit’s documents flesh out the relationship between the entities.
The company earned $18.5 million after tax from its share of the two power stations, a fall of around 25 per cent from the previous financial year.
With Summit’s stake close to 50 per cent in both, that implies Bluewaters and NewGen made a combined profit of $37 million.
The after-tax profit from the two power stations is recorded separately from revenue in the Summit’s annual report, because it does not have a majority stake.
Separately, Summit earned around $8.1 million revenue from services, presumably to its two subsidiaries, but those services were provided at an operating loss of about $1.2 million.
The company’s income statement showed employee expenses of nearly $6 million.
All up, Summit’s net profit after tax was $17.8 million, while contributed equity, the value of the company’s investments in the two generating businesses was $148 million.
The report said Summit’s result was not affected by the unplanned shutdown of the Bluewaters number two generator, which tripped on January 13 and suffered a prolonged outage.
The 217-megawatt generator was out of operation until the middle of this year but is now up and running, according to Australian Energy Market Operator data.
That trip event meant a number of issues for Bluewaters.
First, it needed to outlay for maintenance on the facility.
A second issue was that Summit had to pay back the Australian Energy Market Operator for capacity credits it had earned to keep its generators available to supply the market when needed.
Bluewaters had asked the Supreme Court for the outage to be considered pre-planned, which would have relieved it of the need to pay the credits back.
But a decision in April found that the outage had not been pre-planned and that Bluewaters would need to pay back the credits.
Nonetheless, Summit’s annual report said the financial loss had been covered by insurance.
“Therefore the financial impact to the company is insignificant,” the report said.
