PPL Says Not Focused on Competitive Retail Business, Sees Retail Business as "Modest"

PPL is not "focused" on growing its competitive retail electric supply business, executives said in discussing earnings yesterday.

Executives said that the biggest value of the competitive retail business is the ability to hedge the output of some of PPL's merchant generation.

"So we look at it really as a tool, that we can use among other tools, to place the generation into the marketplace. So that's the primary purpose of it. I think, in terms of incremental investments to go beyond that, it's not something that we are focused on. We are obviously very focused on the regulated side of the business, and any incremental capital that we have is going into the regulated side of the business," executives said.

"We'll plan to keep this [retail] business to be relatively modest in size," executives added. "It's a good natural hedge, because most of the hedging we're doing, is to customers right in the same neighborhood that this generation has been hedging since it's been built. So we'd look for us to be aggressive in adding to that. But there will be periods of time when that retail book provides better return opportunities than the gen does, and periods like in January and February, where the gen provides the better value proposition ... But we will continue to be modest in retail."

Asked by an analyst about the company's thoughts on the strategic future for its Supply business (generation and retail), executives downplayed any deadline for a decision on that business, stating that the company evaluates the Supply business on an ongoing basis. While PPL is focused on optimizing its fleet through cost reductions and operational improvements, executives said that, "we are certainly open to other opportunities and routinely assess the potential for adding further value in the Supply business, and with the overall portfolio in total."