Iberdrola, Europe’s largest power company, has hired investment bank Barclays to sell all 15 of its renewable energy plants in Mexico in an effort to exit the country, the Spanish news website El Confidencial reported Wednesday.
Citing anonymous sources close to the deal, El Confidencial said Iberdrola is looking to sell due to concern about Mexico’s financial and legal stability.
The assets on offer — six wind farms, three solar photovoltaic plants and six cogeneration or combined cycle units — are valued at US $4.7 billion.
In 2023, Iberdrola agreed to sell 55% of its Mexican assets to the Mexican government for US $6 billion. Then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador described the acquisition as a “new nationalization” of the electricity market.
Before that sell-off, the Spanish firm was the largest private generator in Mexico, with more than 11,000 MW installed, providing more than 15% of the nation’s electricity.
By then, Iberdrola had been a frequent target of López Obrador, who sought to give state-owned electricity utility CFE majority control over the local power market.
In 2022, the government disconnected an Iberdrola power plant from the national grid. Two years earlier, Iberdrola had threatened to halt further investment, decrying a lack of clarity in government energy policy.
After the 2023 transaction, Iberdrola insisted it would remain in Mexico, but El Universal columnist Mario Maldonado reported that the company lacked confidence in President Claudia Sheinbaum’s energy policies, which continue to prioritize the CFE, prompting the decision to pull out of Mexico.
Although Iberdrola declined to comment on its agreement with Barclays and its pending departure from Mexico, it did announce a capital increase of five billion euros (US $5.87 billion) to finance investments in electricity networks in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Over the next six years, Iberdrola plans to invest some 55 billion euros (US $64.7 billion) in electricity grids, more than 80% of which will be invested in the U.K. and the U.S.
Iberdrola president Ignacio Sánchez Galán described the plan as “an unprecedented investment opportunity,” according to the newspaper Reforma.
With reports from El Confidencial, Reforma, El Economista, El Universal and Reuters
