Abu Dhabi buys stake in Iberdrola project

IBERDROLA is selling a €2 billion 49 per cent stake in its East Anglia 3 windfarm to the Abu Dhabi company, Masdar.

Neither Iberdrola nor Masdar was prepared to comment on the agreement when the news filtered through on October 24.  Nonetheless, industry sources quoted in the financial daily, Cinco Dias, were confident that the deal would go through.

Construction on the East Anglia 3 wind farm located in the North Sea off the Scottish coast began last year and should be operational by 2026.  With a 1.4-gigawatt capacity and capable of providing electricity for approximately 1.3 million homes, it belongs to the Spanish multinational’s mammoth offshore East Anglia Hub which is the company’s largest renewables project.

Last summer,  Goldman Sachs was engaged to find a buyer for a 49 per cent stake in East Anglia 3, with Iberdrola eventually choosing Masdar, the renewable energy arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala.

Masdar, whose investments in 40 countries are worth an estimated €30 billion, paid €1.6 billion last July for a 49 per cent stake in Iberdrola’s second-largest offshore project, the Baltic Eagle offshore windfarm 30 kilometres off Rugen Island in Germany.

The Masdar operation enters into Iberdrolas’s overall strategy which focuses on investing €17 billion in renewables, €36 billion in infrastructure and €11 billion on its US-based company PNM Resources, which was acquired in January 2022 and provides electricity for 800,000 subscribers in New Mexico and Texas.

The quest for the East Anglia 3 project is not Iberdrola’s only current operation, Cinco Dias maintained.

Amongst other plans, the company headed by Ignacio Sanchez Galan is also said to be considering the sale of a minority stake in its US subsidiary Avangrid.  These tactics centre less on selling off assets than looking for investors to finance Iberdrola’s plans to increase its presence in renewable energy, insiders said.