Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Companies That Rely on Renewables May Need to Hedge Their Bets

Companies investing in renewable energy may begin asking a familiar question following FPL Group Inc.'s second-quarter results: What happens when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine?

Though the utility company's earnings rose 72 percent to $405 million, and analysts are still saying "Buy," according to Thomson Financial's consensus estimates, FPL faced the worst weather conditions in 13 years for its wind-energy division. The wind factor cut FPL's profit by $50 million.

"The only real negative in the quarter was the poor wind resource," said FPL Chief Financial Officer Moray Dewhurst during a conference call.

Instead of taking that to mean wind may not be the best way to go, FPL said it would add between 8,000 and 10,000 megawatts of wind power to its portfolio by the end of 2012.

The company is hedging its bets against the unpredictable by diversifying its wind portfolio geographically, said spokesman Steven Stengel.

From Canadian Business

In the post immediately below I was spitballing doing an ad.

I'm glad we didn't call the agency before we did this post on redundant systems.
With a couple avatars, Bloggengeezer and Klimatar, I might actually get some work done.