Iberdrola's green spending spree eclipses European Big Oil's plans

By Ron Bousso

LONDON (Reuters) - Spanish wind energy group Iberdrola's plans to spend around $88 billion (67.5 billion pounds) on renewable power by 2025 eclipse Europe's top oil companies' combined planned investments in low-carbon over the same period.

Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total, Norway's Equinor, Spain's Repsol and Italy's Eni aim to grow their low-carbon businesses after setting out plans to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.

The group's combined spending on renewables such as offshore wind and solar power as well as retail businesses in some cases is set to grow nearly 10-fold over the next five years from $7.35 billion in 2020 to $69.2 billion by 2025, according to company announcements and Reuters estimates.

Iberdrola said on Thursday it plans to invest 75 billion euros (67.7 billion pounds) in its renewable energy production, grids and retail business by 2025 to capitalise on growing global demand for clean power.

Goldman Sachs estimates that Europe's Big Oil companies could spend close to half of their capital expenditure on low carbon activities compared with 10% to 15% in 2019.

Their installed power capacity is expected to grow 20 fold from 7 gigawatt (GW) currently to over 140 GW by 2030, the bank said in a note in September.

For an interactive version of this chart see https://tmsnrt.rs/3p2kPvg Graphic: Green spending spree - https://graphics.reuters.com/EUROPE-CAPEX/qmypmjzbavr/chart.png

(Reporting by Ron Bousso; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)