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Scotland's second biggest company is seeking almost £500m in new equity funding, saying it is required to exploit opportunities for acquisitions and new renewable developments.

Scottish and Southern Energy announced this morning it is issuing new shares to the value of £470m.

And with markets nervous about rights issues to shore up troubled finances, the chief executive's talk of "reinforcing our balance sheet" has contributed to it making it the biggest faller of the day on the London stock market, following a healthy rise over the past month.

But amid all the financial carnage, analysts reckon this Perth-based business is in relatively safe territory, and its move is a sound one.

Energy utilities are in one of the safer sectors during a recession, and today's trading statement says SSE remains on its course for its profit target this year, of which others could barely dream.

The former publicly-owned Hydro Board and renewables pioneer, it now trades as Scottish Hydro Electric, Southern Electric, SWALEC and Atlantic, and it announced last month it has doubled its customer base to nine million over the past seven years.

The share issue falls short of a rights issue, as it is worth less than 5% of SSE's £10.1bn valuation.

And it may become a familiar sight this year, as companies seek equity to replace the gap where debt funding used to be.

According to the SSE trading statement, the move is intended to support a £6.7bn, five-year investment plan, taking advantage of small and medium-scale opportunities as they arise, and to fund major wind farm developments.

Two of them are specifically cited, one in Scotland, one in Ireland, and together involve 300m of SSE investment.

Chief executive Ian Marchant commented: "Our programme of capital investment in assets which are of critical importance in the UK and Ireland, plus the ability to make opportunistic bolt-on acquisitions should they arise, continue to be at the heart of SSE's plans.

"This is well-illustrated by the new wind farm agreements we are concluding. The successful placing of shares will reinforce our balance sheet strength and enhance the range of options open to us.

"All of this will, in turn, help us to maintain over the next decade the track record of dividend growth we have built up in the past decade."

For a brief period at the end of last year, SSE was Scotland's largest company, its capitalisation passing that of the Royal Bank as its shares sunk.

But the injection of almost £20bn of government capital has pushed up RBS's value and put it back into top slot.