Someone once told me the same thing at /kopitiam. I reminded him to also check how much dividend TNB issued to their share holders and how much was retained as profit for internal investment. For last year 2023, as announced in March 2024 announcement, after paying out dividend, TNB just retained about 100m for internal expenditure.
You can Google or check their dividend data at klse, I was a shareholder of tnb share until I sold it when the price raised to 15 few months ago.
You want to know how much for initial cost, I can tell you it is at least 10 billion yearly, why? Coz TNB is spending about 7B a year just to expand the grid network under capex. This does not include maintenance, rehab, refurbish, replace which is under Opex instead of capex
https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/736792Even if we say small scale, it will at least be 2B, you can't compare their profit with TNB profit as they need to compete in terms of pricing and customer need to change to them.
Fact is nobody wants to do the grid business, even when the it's not restricted. What we see here is private companies only want to set up power plants and sell electric to tnb for a fixed price, easy money, sure earn, no need deal with clients, no need maintain a large network, that's why we have so many private power plants and solar plants.
Gov even out of idea and forced TNB to allow third party access (which caused tnb share price to drop for awhile) so that people can still sell electric without setting up the grid network coz nobody want to build a second network.
If so profit why nobody do? Why no cronies do? We all know if profit sure cronies enter. Why you think power plant so many IPP cronies? Coz it's profitable.
No, no, don't get me wrong. I believe what you say. I think your analysis that IPPs only want to sell power back to TNB is spot on. Though I still think that TNB is profitable because they inherited the set-up of the grid from the government, and didn't have to set it up themselves. No one would want to do it now.