Total bets on US solar

The major snaps up a portfolio including an asset already in production, while Equinor remains at the testing phase

Europe’s largest oil and gas firms might be uniform in their trend of reorienting their traditional business models to also encompass new energies, but the speed and scale of their ambitions are significantly divergent. Two announcements within an hour of each other on Thursday from Total and Norway’s Equinor served to emphasise the point. Total swooped to take a 50pc share in a portfolio of 12 US utility-scale solar and energy storage projects with a 1.6GW cumulative capacity owned by 174 Power Global, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Hanwha Group. Across sites located in Texas, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming and Virginia, the first project started production in 2020 and the remainder will be put ons