Net profit at RWE more than doubled last year according to preliminary figures, pushed higher by earnings exceeding expectations in the gas and supply & trading segments, as well as by an expansion in the German utility’s renewable energy capacity.
The company in 2022 commissioned its Triton Knoll offshore wind farm in the UK, and started feeding power into the German grid from the 342MW Kaskasi project off the island of Heligoland.
“Due to the earnings development in the Supply & Trading segment and the higher deployment of our power plants in the Hydro/Biomass/Gas segment, we expect earnings to exceed our forecast,” chief financial officer Michael Müller said.
“A key driver for our earnings growth year-on-year was the increase of our generation capacity based on renewables. In the past year, we continued to successfully expand our portfolio of wind farms and solar plants and we significantly increased our total net cash investments to €4.4bn.”
The utility expects its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (Ebitda) to have risen to €6.31bn ($6.89bn) last year, from €3.65bn in 2021. That helped push adjusted net income up to €3.23bn, more than double the €1.55bn reached a year earlier.
RWE plans to release its final 2022 figures on 21 March 2023.
According to the preliminary results, adjusted Ebitda in the offshore wind segment rose to €1.41bn last year, up from €1.11bn a year earlier, despite wind levels that were below the long-term average.
Additional capacity also helped the onshore wind/solar area, where adjusted Ebitda soared to €827m from €258m in 2021, when an extreme cold spell in the US state of Texas had led to substantial one-off losses.
RWE greatly profited from the energy crisis triggered by the Russian war on Ukraine in the form of short-term power-plant deployment in the hydro/biomass/gas segment, which saw its adjusted Ebitda jump to €2.37bn last year, from €731m a year earlier.
The company also posted very strong preliminary results in supply & trading, with Ebitda in the segment rising to €1.16bn, compared to €769m.
The energy crisis did, however, dent into coal and nuclear earnings, as the company has sold forward most of the electricity production from its German lignite and nuclear power stations before the onset of the crisis. That pushed down the adjusted Ebitda in the segment to €751m in 2022, from €889m in 2021.
