Rapid City, SD-based Black Hills Corp. CEO David Emery Thursday told financial analysts on a conference call that the energy holding company is in “excellent financial shape,” and it has no significant exposure to the current Wall Street capital crisis.

Black Hills plans to complete financing for the acquisition of Aquila’s electric utility in Colorado and Aquila’s four natural gas utilities in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska for $940 million before February, and Emery sees no impediments to that financing from the current problems in the investment community. The acquisition deal closed in July (see Daily GPI, July 15). The acquired Aquila utilities will operate under the name Black Hills Energy.

“There will be a debt offering, and certainly there is a lot of turmoil in the financial markets right now,” Emery said. “We recognize that, but deals are getting done in the energy space, particularly among the utilities. We believe that will hold true and provide us a good opportunity to get our capital before February of next year.”

Emery was asked whether Black Hills had any exposure to Constellation Energy through Enserco, its trading arm.

“Only very little exposure to either Constellation or Lehman Brothers,” Emery said. “We are watching our credit and exposure very, very carefully in all situations. Generally, we have managed our credit extremely tightly the whole time we have been in the energy marketing sector. To date, over the whole course of that 12 years, we have suffered less than a million dollars in cumulatively credit losses. We are watching it carefully, but we really don’t have an significant exposure we are worried about at the current time.”

Separately, other holding companies in the West, including San Diego-based Sempra Energy and Portland, OR-based PacifiCorp, indicated they were not concerned about the Wall Street woes adversely impacting their operations and prospective deal-making.

Sempra last Tuesday said it had “no significant exposure” to the Wall Street problems. Its exposure to Lehman Brothers and American International Group Inc. combined is less than $20 million, the company said.

Sempra last year moved its trading to a joint venture with global banking giant, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which buffers its financial exposure in trading while still giving it the opportunity for significant profits. Wachovia analyst Sam Brothwell told the Wall Street Journal that Sempra looked “prescient” now that it had RBS assuming all the balance-sheet risk in its trading operations. It was part of a Journal report on the rescue of Constellation Energy and the fact that it has helped strengthen some of the energy utility sector stocks.

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