Avangrid signs Microsoft to a 100-MW solar deal as Iberdrola leans harder into US load growth

Avangrid signs Microsoft to a 100-MW solar deal as Iberdrola leans harder into US load growth Spain's Iberdrola is building its American solar pipeline around hyperscaler demand even as financial sponsors cash out of rival Iberian utility Naturgy. Avangrid, the US business of Spain's Iberdrola, said on Thursday (2026-06-04) it had signed an agreement to supply electricity to Microsoft from its Bluebird Solar project in Klickitat County, Washington, a plant designed for 140 megawatts of direct-current capacity, or 100 megawatts alternating current.² That matters because the marginal buyer of new American renewable power is increasingly a data-center operator, not a utility offtaker or a state mandate.² Microsoft's name on a corporate power-purchase agreement is what lets a project like Bluebird reach financial close. For Iberdrola, whose US arm is one of the larger owners of renewables in the country, the hyperscaler relationship is becoming the demand anchor for its build-out. Bluebird represents about $300 million of investment and sits near four other Avangrid projects in the same county, the company said.² Over its life the plant is expected to contribute roughly $11 million in local property taxes.² Those are modest figures on their own. The pattern underneath them is not. Avangrid recently finished building the 166-MWdc Tower Solar project in Morrow County, Oregon.² Last year (2025) it brought online the 57-MWdc Camino Solar in Kern County, California, and the larger 202-MWdc Powell Creek Solar in Putnam County.² The cadence is steady and unglamorous: mid-sized solar plants, one county at a time, increasingly tied to a named corporate buyer. The scale of the parent's American footprint is already substantial. At the end of the first quarter of 2026 Iberdrola's US installed base ran to 8,205 MW of onshore wind, 1,550 MW of solar, 390 MW of offshore wind and a tail of hydro, cogeneration and gas, according to its quarterly report.² Solar is the part still growing fastest, and the Microsoft deal shows where the incremental megawatts are pointed. On the regulated side, Iberdrola distributed 10,012 GWh of power in the US in the first three months of 2026, against 25,582 GWh of gas, the company reported.² That split is a reminder that the US business is still a gas-heavy distribution utility with a renewables generation arm bolted on, not a pure-play clean-energy story. But the appetite for owning Iberian utility assets is not uniform, and the contrast is sharp. While Iberdrola pours capital into US generation, financial sponsors have been heading for the exit at its Spanish peer Naturgy. CVC Capital Partners sold its entire 13.8% stake in late May (2026-05-27) in a deal worth around €4bn, or $4.65bn, executed through Goldman Sachs via an accelerated bookbuilding, Reuters reported.¹ CVC was not first out. In March 2026 BlackRock divested its remaining 11.4% holding in Naturgy for €2.79bn, a sale run by J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs.¹ Two large institutional holders cutting positions inside three months tells you something about how private capital now reads the risk-reward in a regulated European gas and power utility. The pricing was telling too. The CVC offering placed 107.5 million shares, about 11.08% of Naturgy, at €28.55 each, a 4.64% discount to market.¹ A discount that wide on a liquid utility is the price of moving a block in a hurry. CVC also settled derivative transactions covering a further 26.4 million shares, roughly 2.72% of the company.¹ The two threads point in opposite directions. One operator is adding US generation exposure on the back of rising power demand; two sponsors are reducing exposure to a Spanish gas-and-power incumbent. Capital is not leaving the sector so much as repricing where inside it the growth and the risk now sit. The near-term test is whether Bluebird's commissioning lands on schedule and whether more hyperscaler offtake follows it into Avangrid's pipeline.² If data-center demand keeps underwriting new American solar at this cadence, the question for European utility investors gets simpler and more uncomfortable: why hold a regulated Iberian balance sheet when the same parent's growth is being written in US power-purchase agreements?¹