SSE boss to retire as energy giant reports sharp rise in profit

SSE boss Alistair Phillips-Davies is to retire after more than 11 years at the helm, as the energy company reported a more than one-quarter jump in profit.

Mr Phillips-Davies oversaw SSE’s exit from the retail energy market in 2019, selling that part of its business to Ovo, and kicked off a five-year, £20.5 billion investment plan, which it is now halfway through.

Chairman Sir John Manzoni said Mr Phillips-Davies turned the company into a “genuine energy transition leader, sharpening its focus on networks, renewables and flexibility, whilst successfully entering new markets”.

He added that Mr Phillips-Davies had also “created a legacy of critical clean electricity infrastructure,” adding that the firm’s plans to hit net zero remain “unchanged”.

The company has yet to announce a successor, but Mr Phillips-Davies will stay on until it makes an appointment.

SSE also reported that its half-year profit rose 26.4% to £714.5 million, led by a sharp jump in earnings at its renewables arm which was driven by windier weather boosting output across its array of wind farms.

The company generated 5.4 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable power over the six months to September, enough to power more than 1.6 million UK homes for a year.

Meanwhile, it said it is halfway through its £20.5 billion investment plan, which involves connecting an onshore wind farm in Shetland to the UK power grid and building a £4.3 billion subsea transmission cable between Peterhead in Scotland to a site in Yorkshire.

Both projects contribute to plans from the Government to ramp up massively clean energy generation on UK soil and in its waters to virtually cut out carbon emissions from the grid by 2030.

SSE is also working on the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the 3.6 gigawatt Dogger Bank scheme, and said it expects to complete the first part of that by the second half of 2025.

Mr Phillips-Davies said: “We are encouraged by the increasing attractiveness of our main markets and our alignment with the new UK Government’s mission to achieve clean power by 2030.

“SSE will be a key delivery partner with our £20 billion investment programme and the scale and quality of our project pipeline that spans renewables, electricity networks and flexible power plants – which will all be required to make clean power a reality.”