Ørsted cleared to shed Danish grid co Radius, other businesses

Danish offshore wind major Ørsted A/S (CPH:ORSTED) has won clearance from local regulators for the sale of its power distribution, residential customer and city light businesses to SEAS-NVE.

More specifically, the company received the approval of Danish competition authorities and the Danish Energy Agency. It now expects to close the transaction at the very end of August 2020.

As announced in September 2019, Ørsted agreed to sell these operations for a price of DKK 21.3 billion (USD 3.2bn/EUR 2.86bn), excluding cash and debt at the businesses in question.

Ørsted tried to find a buyer for these activities in late June 2018 but the process was interrupted in mid-January 2019 as the Danish ministry of finance unveiled it was no longer supporting the move. Danish cooperatively-owned energy company SEAS-NVE then made an unsolicited, non-binding offer for the operations in the second half of June 2019.

Ørsted’s power distribution business is known as Radius and it has about one million power customers in the Copenhagen area, North Zealand and parts of central Zealand. In turn, the residential customer business sells electricity to some 717,000 customers, gas to around 105,000 customers and heat to roughly 44,000 customers. The city light business operates and maintains some 145,000 street lights in 15 municipalities on Zealand, according to information shared in September.

(DKK 1.0 = USD 0.151/EUR 0.134)

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