The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has once again attacked the Spanish company Iberdrola, which he has included in a public intervention within a group of private companies that "have done dirty business with clean energy."
“Individuals, Iberdrola, from Spain and other foreign companies, those produced clean energy, and that is why these companies had to be given preferential treatment. You know what? We send them to hell”, he was sent to the framework of a meeting with the general director of the Federal Electricity Commission (public electricity employer in Mexico), Manuel Bartlett, and with the governor of the Mexican state of Veracruz, Cuitláhuac García.
López Obrador slipped into his speech four of his longest speeches: the people, the previous administration, the foreign 'invader' and his desire to implement an energy reform that involves nationalizing the sector.
Ensuring that the people are fully awake stated that foreign companies did business with previous governments, in clear reference to the previous Peña Nieto term, which allowed private companies to enter energy production.
One of the pillars of his well-known ideological plan, called the Fourth Transformation, happens because the Mexican State is charged with the generation of energy that also dictates prices. Thus, the Tabasco politician declared in front of the workers that companies like Iberdrola had "the perverse intention of destroying the CFE (national energy manager) because it supposedly produced dirty energy." "These companies received a subsidy, a lot of money from the budget, which is the people's money," he concludes.
López Obrador intends to profile himself as the savior of the CFE which, in his words, "was going to go bankrupt discovering less and less energy" so he bets on "local energy". The deployment of his long-awaited energy reform expands a little more than two years after the end of his only six-year term by law and without the qualified majority necessary for a possible realization of his long-awaited nationalization, one of his star projects.
The collapse of a coal mine with ten mines inside at the beginning of the month in the Mexican state of Coahuila, in the northeast of the country, does not help because these prospects supply 99% of the black ore to the CFE's boilers.
The implementation of the new law is in doubt, but what is certain is that the horrible pronouncements against Iberdrola will continue. In mid-July, López Obrador reported that his administration will "thoroughly" investigate the resolution of a sentence that provisionally "saved" the Spanish company from the payment of 9.145 million pesos (458 million euros), imposed by the Commission Energy regulator. It would have been the second largest fine in the history of Mexico.
Spanish businessmen consulted for this newspaper "hold out the downpour" until the end of the mandate with the hope that the waters calm down to be able to go back with more investments. While projects are being carried out off plan and the flight of engineers continues in search of latitudes in which they promote new private projects in clean energy.
The weight of Iberdrola in Mexico
The Mexican president has preferred to ignore the more than 2,800 million dollars that the Bilbao factory invites in power generation in the country, which adds an additional 2,000 megawatts of investment to the eight projects under construction for four years.
The Spanish company is the largest private power generator in the country, bringing 20% of the electricity consumed in Mesoamerica alone.
