May 8 (Reuters) - Utility Talen Energy reported

a loss for the first quarter on Thursday, hurt by higher

interest and energy expenses, although data center demand

prospects helped buffer losses.

Higher-for-longer interest rates burden utilities as they

make investing in the construction and maintenance of power

grids and other infrastructures more expensive.

Talen shares were up slightly in afternoon trade after

falling by 3% in premarket trading.

Talen said its interest costs jumped 25.4% to $74 million

during the reported quarter, while total energy expenses

increased by 10.8% to $235 million.

The quarterly loss was also driven by an absence of the

gains realized from the sale of a data center to Amazon ( AMZN )

last year for $650 million.

The results echo those of other nuclear utility peers such

as Vistra ( VST ) and Constellation Energy ( CEG ), which were

also weighed by higher interest rates.

Talen owns and operates about 10.7 gigawatts of power

infrastructure in the United States. It produces and sells

electricity, capacity, and ancillary services into wholesale

U.S. power markets.

Talen narrowed its full-year adjusted core profit outlook to

be in the range of $975 million to $1.13 billion, from a prior

view of $925 million to $1.18 billion.

The utility also said it had identified extra maintenance

work in Unit 2 of the Susquehanna nuclear facility, which had

already been placed under a planned outage in March.

"We have elected to complete this scope of work while Unit 2

is already in outage and market prices and demand are relatively

low," Talen said, adding the outage will be extended into

mid-May.

The Houston-Texas based company reported a net loss

attributable to stockholders of $135 million for the quarter

ended March 31, compared with a profit of $294 million a year

ago.

The company, however, said it was continuing to increase

electricity to an Amazon ( AMZN ) data center at Talen's Pennsylvania

nuclear power plant. Executives said they were optimistic about

other deals with technology companies to supply huge quantities

of electricity for data centers, which are used for the

expansion of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.