“It’s cheaper and more efficient to implement these policies through state-owned companies,” Romero told me. “We believe that state-owned companies have a longer-term horizon that can sustain these kinds of investments. Sometimes private companies don’t, or the investment and return horizons are not within the range that investors are expecting, so they need to be incentivized and subsidized,” he added. These investments will still involve a sizable role for the private sector—particularly for financing—but higher-level coordination, Romero argues, can offer investors, certainly in terms of pricing and scheduling, things that private sector–led projects often can’t. In the U.S., for instance, several high-profile…