Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Iberdrola is a giant utility that generates and sells electricity and gas to millions of homes and businesses, mostly in Spain, the UK, the US, and Brazil.
Iberdrola is one of the world's biggest electric utilities. It makes electricity, moves it across power lines, and sells it to homes, factories, and businesses. It also sells natural gas. Most of its customers are in Spain, the UK, the United States, and Brazil, and it runs the whole chain from the wind farm or power plant down to the meter on your wall.
What makes Iberdrola interesting is how it makes its electricity. It is one of the largest producers of renewable power on the planet, with a huge fleet of wind farms — both onshore and offshore — plus solar plants and hydroelectric dams. It has spent the last two decades shifting away from dirty coal and toward clean energy, which sounds noble but was really a hard-nosed business bet: wind and sun are free fuel, so once you build the plant, your costs are low and predictable. That matters in a business where profit is the gap between what it costs to make power and what regulators or markets let you charge for it. The company is split into networks and renewables. The networks side owns the poles and wires that carry electricity to your house, and it earns a steady, regulated return — the kind of boring, reliable money that pays dividends. The renewables side builds and runs the wind and solar farms and sells the power, which is more exciting and riskier. Iberdrola also has a retail arm that bills customers directly, and it has been pushing into smart grids and energy storage as the world electrifies everything from cars to heating.
In 1901, northern Spain's factories were hungry for power, but the electricity couldn't easily reach them. Hidroeléctrica Ibérica had a simple but big idea: build the power plants far from the cities and send the electricity down long high-voltage lines. That one move created the idea of a national electricity market and planted the seed of today's networks business.
Saltos del Duero had ambitious plans for hydro power but needed a big market to sell it to. Hidroeléctrica Ibérica had that market. So in 1944 the two merged to form Iberduero, putting grand dams and a growing customer base under one roof.
Iberduero and Hidroeléctrica Española joined forces in 1992 to create Iberdrola. The new company wasted no time: it set its sights on expanding internationally.
Ignacio Galán took over as chief executive in 2001 and launched a plan centered on new markets and clean energy. While rivals spread themselves across all sorts of businesses, Iberdrola made a bold bet on wind power, which most competitors thought was a small niche. The Kyoto Protocol and European rules were pushing the world toward cleaner energy, and Iberdrola wanted to be there first.
In 2006, Galán was appointed chairman of Iberdrola, a role he would be re-elected to again and again over the years.
The integration with ScottishPower was completed in 2007, making the group the third-largest utility in Europe. That same year, Iberdrola's renewable arm, Iberdrola Renovables, went public in the most successful industrial IPO of the year.
In 2008, Iberdrola finished integrating Energy East, renaming it Iberdrola USA. The company was now firmly planted in the United States.
Iberdrola bought Elektro, one of Brazil's biggest electricity distributors, running in São Paulo and Mato Grosso. It also fully folded in Iberdrola Renovables and struck a strategic alliance with Qatar Holding.
In 2017, Iberdrola announced it would shut down all of its coal-fired power capacity for good. The company that once ran on coal was now firmly a clean-energy business.
In 2024, Iberdrola agreed to buy the rest of Avangrid, taking full ownership of its US subsidiary. In the UK, it agreed to buy the distributor ENW for €5 billion, making it the country's second-largest electricity networks operator. At the same time, it sold most of its Mexican business, shedding the thermal generation it no longer wanted.
The group launched its 2025-2028 Strategic Plan, promising more than €58 billion of investment focused on expanding its networks business in the US and UK. Pedro Azagra began a new phase as chief executive, and Iberdrola completed a €5 billion capital increase, reaching a market value of €120 billion.
The big risk is politics and regulation. Utilities live and die by what governments let them charge, and Iberdrola has clashed with Spanish regulators over taxes and with the UK over price caps. Rising interest rates also hurt, because these companies borrow enormous sums to build giant projects, and the bills get heavier when rates climb. Still, the long-term tailwind is real: the world needs far more electricity, and Iberdrola is one of the largest operators of the clean kind. It pays a steady dividend and reinvests heavily in new wind and solar capacity, betting that the future runs on electrons.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026