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Riyadh: Saudi Arabia's utility sector recorded a 10 per cent growth last year, a top official said.
Mahmoud Taiba, chairman of Saudi Electricity Company (SEC), said the number of SEC's consumers exceeded five million by the end of 2007.
"SEC is striving hard to make available its services to all parts of the Kingdom. It was successful in making electricity available to 240 more villages during the last year," he said.
"The number of cities and villages with electricity facilities jumped to 10,953 in 2007 from 10,713 in the previous year, a growth of 5.3 per cent," he said adding that the company also implemented several development projects in electricity generation, transmission and distribution.
Taiba said SEC has spent a total of 13.46 billion riyals for these projects during the last year. Since its inception in 2007, the company has spent 93.94 billion riyals for implementing various electricity generation, transmission and distribution projects.
"Allocations have been made for implementing projects worth 27.64 billion riyals during the current year," he said.
SEC is the largest utility in the Gulf, both by market capitalisation and in terms of its installed power generation capacity. The company was formed in 1999 as the result of a merger of the country's 10 regional power companies.
The Riyadh-based company is 74 per cent government-owned, with the rest of its shares held by the private sector.
In turn, it owns 50 per cent of Water and Electricity Company, the single off-taker for independent water and power projects in the Kingdom.
The company is also working on improving the efficiency of its workforce. It had a problem with long-term staff who, despite having high salaries, were no longer considered to be productive. Already, almost 800 people have accepted redundancy packages and will be replaced with new employees.
SEC owns assets with a generation capacity of 33,000MW, which accounts for 85 per cent of the country's total. Its portfolio of projects under way is worth 40 billion riyals.
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