The Energy Narrative: Discursive Strategies for Repositioning the Spanish Energy Sector in the Context of the Energy Transition

The energy transition constitutes not only a technological and regulatory challenge but also a communicative and cultural one, in which corporate narratives play a decisive role in shaping social understanding, legitimacy, and trust. This study examines how major energy companies operating in Spain construct the narrative of the energy transition through their corporate discourse and evaluates the extent to which these narratives integrate pedagogical and relational dimensions oriented toward society. Using a qualitative content analysis approach supported by lexical frequency analysis as a heuristic tool, the study analyzes the CEO or Chair letters published in sustainability reports by four energy companies—Iberdrola, Endesa, Naturgy, and Holaluz—over a five-year period (2020–2024), comprising a total of 20 reports, from which 18 CEO/Chair letters were extracted and treated as a single analytical unit. Two reports (Iberdrola and Naturgy, 2024) adopted the ESRS/CSRD format directly, eliminating the traditional chairperson’s letter. To triangulate and contextualize the documentary analysis, a two-round Delphi study was conducted with 11 independent experts. The findings reveal a predominantly technical and self-referential discourse focused on corporate strategy, performance, and regulatory compliance, with a limited presence of explanatory or citizen-oriented narratives. Despite increasing terminological convergence driven by regulatory standardization, the analysis reveals persistent divergence in narrative framing, with the challenger company articulating purpose-driven and citizen-empowerment frames largely absent from incumbent discourse. The Delphi results reinforce these findings, emphasizing the need to strengthen pedagogical clarity, accessibility, and relational orientation in energy communication. On this basis, the study proposes a relational model of energy communication that highlights narrative mediation, social intelligibility, and stakeholder-oriented discourse as key factors for enhancing legitimacy and trust in the context of the energy transition. The analysis further identifies a structural tension between regulatory standardization and narrative capacity, exemplified by the elimination of the CEO letter in one company’s 2024 report following ESRS adoption.