Utility Talen Energy posts quarterly loss on higher expenses

May 8 (Reuters) – Utility Talen Energy reported a loss for the first quarter on Thursday, hurt by higher interest and energy expenses, sending its shares down 3.3% in premarket trading.

Higher-for-longer interest rates burden utilities as it makes investing in the construction and maintenance of power grids and other infrastructures more expensive.

Talen said its interest costs jumped 25.4% to $74 million during the reported quarter, while total energy expenses increased by 10.8% to $235 million.

The quarterly loss was also driven by an absence of the gains realized from the sale of a data center to Amazon last year for $650 million.

The results echo those of other nuclear utility peers such as Vistra and Constellation Energy, which were also weighed down by higher interest rates.

Talen owns and operates about 10.7 gigawatts of power infrastructure in the United States. It produces and sells electricity, capacity, and ancillary services into wholesale U.S. power markets.

Talen narrowed its full-year adjusted core profit outlook to be in the range of $975 million to $1.13 billion from a prior view of $925 million to $1.18 billion.

The utility also said it had identified extra maintenance work in Unit 2 of the Susquehanna nuclear facility, which had already been placed under a planned outage in March.

“We have elected to complete this scope of work while Unit 2 is already in outage and market prices and demand are relatively low,” Talen said adding that the outage will be extended into mid-May.

The Houston-Texas based company reported a net loss attributable to stockholders of $135 million for the quarter ended March 31, compared with a profit of $294 million, a year ago. (Reporting by Katha Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)