Endesa expects to gain 400,000 electricity customers by 2025 and will distribute 70% of its profit in dividends

Spain's second-largest electricity company, Endesa, made a commitment to its shareholders on Wednesday to distribute 70% of its ordinary net profit in dividends over the next three years. The new strategic plan of the company led by José Bogas also includes a 15% increase in total investment in Spain, to 8.6 billion euros, with renewables as a priority growth target. However, the reception from investors has been negative: its shares fell by more than 5% in the first hours of trading.

The development of wind and solar farms will account for the bulk of the investment planned for the period 2023-2025: half will go to this end, almost 40% more than in the last strategic plan. There will be 4,400 megawatts (MW) of new installed solar capacity, to which must be added another 1,400 MW of photovoltaic capacity. In addition to what has already been built, Endesa expects to reach 14,000 MW of green power by the end of this timeframe. Then, 91% of its generation on the Peninsula should be emission-free, including nuclear, almost 20 percentage points more than today.

This accelerated expansion of renewables fits in with the new line set by Endesa's parent company, Italy's Enel, which announced the day before that it will abandon the commercialization of gas in Spain to focus all its efforts on the electricity market.

"In the current market context, accelerating the electrification of energy consumption from clean sources is the way to achieve a reliable energy system," Bogas emphasized at a conference with investors held on Wednesday. The goal, he said, is to "cover an increasing proportion of the fixed-price contracts" signed with its customers with its "growing emission-free production". That, he says, will guarantee "competitive prices". Today, in addition to being the cleanest technologies, both wind and solar are the cheapest for generating electricity.

On the commercial side, Endesa expects to add 400,000 new customers by 2025, a 6% increase. This increase, it says, will allow the total volume of electricity sold at fixed prices to grow by 2%. The prices of these contracts, however, will fall at a very slow pace from their current record highs: the expected decrease is barely 10% by 2025, despite the fact that the expected landing on the wholesale electricity market is much higher.

66,000 charging points

Despite the fact that the deployment of electric cars in Spain is lagging behind other major European countries, the path is set, with an acceleration in registrations of this type of vehicle in the coming years. And Endesa does not want to be left behind in the race to replace gas stations with plugs: the strategic plan submitted this Wednesday to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) involves a five-fold increase in the number of public and private recharging points. They will increase from 14,000 to 66,000.