Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) reported a 25 percent rise in second-quarter net profit on higher tariffs and increased sales. SEC made a net profit of SR1.335 billion ($356 million) in the three months to end-June, compared with SR1.068 billion in the same period last year, it said in a statement posted on the bourse website. "The rise in net profit for the (first) six months is due to a tariff adjustment for the government, commercial and industrial sectors as well as an increase in energy sales," the statement said. Operational profit increased 27 percent to 1.2 billion riyals in the quarter. The company, which has a current installed capacity of 50,000 megawatts, plans to boost capacity to at least 80,000 MW by 2020. SEC is 81 percent owned by the government and has projects to add 1,826 MW in 2011 and another 12,752 MW from 2012 to 2016. Power demand in the Kingdom rises 7-8 percent annually amid a growing population that exceeds 27 million. Seventy percent of energy consumption in the Kingdom goes to air-conditioning, largely due to consumers using inefficient devices. The CEO and President of SEC, Eng. Ali Bin Saleh Al-Barrak has said earlier that 50 percent of electricity in the Kingdom is produced by using natural gas available as a fuel. He has called upon foreign investors to take advantage of what he described as "good investment opportunities in Saudi Arabia". He said that the SEC plans to spend $80 billion over the next decade to keep pace with population growth, which will result in an increase in demand for electricity by more than 30,000 megawatts by the year 2020. He told the London-based The International Resource Journal recently that work has already begun to keep pace with the anticipated increase in demand, where "there are projects that have been announced, and there are other projects being planned and will be launched later and the other is applied now and will enter service within three years."
