REG focuses on UK wind, waste oil for growth

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Renewable Energy Generation is planning to significantly increase its wind power assets next year, while bringing its profitable waste cooking oil business to commercialization. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Whalley said the company planned to invest 100 million pounds ($166.6 million) over the next three years, mostly in expanding its operating wind assets.

"We've repaid all of our outstanding borrowing and have about 50 million pounds of cash on balance sheet, so enough to make the company quite a significant player in the renewables sector," he told Reuters in a telephone interview on Thursday.

While REG's main focus is wind energy, Whalley said REG is the only company in the UK that can turn waste cooking oil into fuel for electricity generation.

"It only needs a small investment of 5 million pounds over the next 12 months, which will take it to the stage where it can generate enough cash to fund itself internally," Whalley said.

REG, which currently has 21 Megawatts of operating wind assets in the UK, plans to have a further 16 MW up and running next year and is targeting to grow capacity to over 100 MW over the next few years.

Whalley said REG, which has a market cap of about 70 million pounds, would likely agree a corporate debt facility to bring the company up to the 100 million pounds it planned to invest overall.

"We've gone from being a relatively high risk lend for a bank to one of the lowest risk in the sector," he said, referring to the group's strong balance sheet following the sale of its Canadian operations earlier this year.

He was speaking after REG posted full-year results showing revenues of 5.6 million pounds and a pretax loss of 2.4 million pounds.

(Reporting by Victoria Bryan, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)

($1=.6002 Pound)