With less than a month to go until the U.S. Presidential election, you might think election fever is running high among European CEOs with a large U.S. presence.
But when I asked Iberdrola chairman Ignacio Galan yesterday if he was worried about the future of his multi-billion-dollar investments in offshore wind in the U.S. should Donald Trump become president again, the leader of the world’s third-largest utility was remarkably unphased.
“We’ve been with Trump before,” he said. “It’s not new for us.”
I had expected a more concerned outlook from Galan, whose company experienced a public blowback in Massachusetts this Summer after a GE windmill it was due to start operating soon, broke, and fell into the sea. The bad headlines coincided with the Trump campaign repeating debunked claims that windmills are “killing our birds” and that offshore wind farms are driving whales “crazy”.
Regardless of the election outcome, Iberdrola, a Fortune Global 500 company, expects to double down on its renewable investments in the U.S., Galan told me. That is thanks in large part to the long-term “predictability” the Inflation Reduction Act brought about, but also because a previous Trump presidency barked but didn’t bite on renewable energy developments.
“When Trump arrived, [Obama era] support [for renewables] was maintained,” he said.
Another reason for Galan’s downplaying of the presidential election outcome may well be that economic fundamentals—rather than political rallying cries—are driving European foreign direct investment decisions in the US. For Iberdrola, Galan said, the need to upgrade America’s outdated electrical grid is what drives 80% of the company’s presence in the U.S.—not renewables.
Or, to say it with a punchline: with large data centers requiring ever more energy, and the electrification of the energy sector continuing unabated, Iberdrola is more concerned with making America’s grid great again than “Make America Great Again.”
With economic conditions in Europe bleak, other European executives may do well to follow Galan’s pragmatic American playbook, whoever succeeds Biden in January.
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Peter Vanham
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