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PG&E's profits miss estimates due to higher maintenance, operating costs

The utility firm PG&E Corp. narrowly missed Wall Street expectations for the second-quarter profits, due to an increase in operating costs.

The company's total operating and maintenance expenses rose by 3.7%, to $2.86 Billion. It also said that wildfire claims, net recoveries, and the utility’s wildfire fund expenditure increased from one year ago.

PG&E is responsible for a number of wildfires in California, including the most deadly. It has made investments to improve its grid's reliability.

The utility stated that it would build 700 miles underground power lines, and upgrade 500 miles of wildfire safety systems between 2025-2026.

Patti Poppe, CEO of the company, said that over 10,000 sensors have been deployed in high-risk zones to detect problems early and reduce outages.

The utility said that it would also be working on supplying 10 gigawatts of new electricity from data center projects in the next ten year.

The final engineering phase of 17 data centers totaling 1.5 GW is expected to start operations in 2026 or 2030.

As tech giants look for places to build data centres to meet the increasing computational needs of artificial intelligence, electric utilities in the U.S. have seen a surge in requests for power capacity.

In the second quarter, the company added 3,300 new electric grid customers.

The total operating revenue for the quarter fell from $5.99 billion to $5.90billion.

According to LSEG, PG&E's adjusted quarterly profit was 31 cents per diluted share for the period ending June 30. This missed Wall Street's expectations by one cent per share.

In afternoon trading, the company's stock was down by 1.3%. (Reporting and editing by Shash Kuber in Bengaluru, with Sumit Saha reporting from Bengaluru)

(source: Reuters)