Mariana Schoua

In 1994, a newly qualified accountant joined the Buenos Aires office of an electricity generator that had just passed into private hands. She was effectively the second person hired there, after the general manager. Three decades later, those power plants had changed owners four times, and she was still there, moving up another step with each transition.

Mariana Schoua now leads Aconcagua Energía Renovables and chairs AmCham Argentina, the chamber representing more than seven hundred companies and which had never before been led by a woman. Her career offers a view of Argentina’s recent electricity-market history from the inside.

A privatization as a starting point

The story began with the breakup of Hidronor. In 1993, U.S.-based Dominion obtained the concession for the Cerros Colorados complexes in Neuquén as part of the electricity privatizations of the 1990s. The operation was split between the province and Buenos Aires, with its structure still taking shape.

That was when Schoua joined, hired by the general manager shortly after completing her degree in accounting at the University of Buenos Aires. She handled a little bit of everything, perhaps the best possible training when a company is still being built. She was young, she was a woman and she was an accountant in an industry dominated by middle-aged male engineers. Years later, she summed it up with humor: being young eventually passed; the rest remained.

Those meetings in which she felt that every contribution she made was subjected to an extra filter gave her a method: arrive more prepared than necessary. Her working assumption was simple. If she had something valuable to contribute, gender would eventually become secondary. She later acknowledged the cost of that strategy as well: it made her more rigid than she would have liked during her first years as a leader.

Duke, Orazul and the step-by-step rise

In August 1999, Duke Energy acquired Dominion’s operations in Argentina, Peru, Bolivia and Belize for US$405 million, taking control of the Neuquén plants in March of the following year. Schoua spent a decade in administration and finance before becoming finance director, and in 2012 she was placed in charge of the entire Argentine operation.

That promotion had one detail she has pointed out herself: the final decision was made by another woman, the group’s international CEO. Schoua thus became the first woman to hold that position within the company’s group of businesses, at a time when meetings of Argentina’s power-generation associations included virtually no women.

In October 2016, Duke announced its withdrawal from Latin America and sold its regional assets to I Squared Capital for around US$1.2 billion. The new owner renamed the business Orazul Energy, with operations in Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru as well. Schoua remained president of the Argentine subsidiary.

The return to Argentine capital

The most significant turn came in December 2023. Aconcagua Energía, founded by former YPF executives Diego Trabucco and Javier Basso, acquired Orazul Argentina for US$9.2 million. The package included 576 MW of installed capacity at Planicie Banderita and Alto Valle, stakes in the Manuel Belgrano, San Martín and Vuelta de Obligado power plants, the Coronel Dorrego wind project, licenses to trade gas and electricity, and 102 employees.

In February 2024, Schoua was appointed CEO of Aconcagua Energía Renovables. After thirty years working for foreign groups, it was the first time she reported to Argentine shareholders. The group holds thirteen hydrocarbon concessions in the Neuquén and Cuyo basins, with operations in Mendoza, Río Negro and Neuquén.

The ending of this part of the story has an interesting twist. The Cerros Colorados concession, awarded for thirty years in 1993, expired, and the government put the Comahue hydroelectric complexes out to tender again. At the end of 2025, Aconcagua sold the concessionaire to BML Inversora, part of Grupo MSU, and in December the dam passed for another three decades to Grupo Edison, which offered US$64.1 million. The hydroelectric operation Schoua had been connected to since her first day at work no longer belongs to the company she runs, although Aconcagua retains the thermal plant, stakes in other generators, the wind farm and the gas business.

Six months in a thirty-year career

While serving as CFO, Schoua became pregnant with twins, who were born after six and a half months of pregnancy and spent two months in hospital. At first, she arranged a shorter working day, from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, with two hours set aside for breastfeeding —two, because there were two babies— and then returned to the hospital. Eventually, she took six months of leave.

The way she framed that period says a great deal about how she thinks: six months within a career lasting more than three decades could not define her. Her children are now twenty.

There is another detail from those years that she often brings up. When she was offered leadership of the Argentine operation in 2012, she did not answer immediately. She first discussed it with her husband because the job would involve more travel. Years later, she wondered whether a man in her position would have felt the same need to ask.

Diversity without quotas and conscious leadership

Her position on gender differs considerably from the usual corporate playbook. She prioritizes integration over numbers and is wary of committees built around a single group because, in her view, they can end up creating closed spaces. She argues that positive discrimination is still discrimination and that cultural change requires everyone, not half the organization.

That is why she emphasizes a point often left out of the discussion: flexibility benefits must also extend to men. In her view, a man who leaves work on time and picks up his children from school creates the practical conditions that allow the woman beside him to lead.

When she became president of the Argentine operation and noticed how few women were running electricity generators in the country, she approached Vital Voices to understand the gap. Today she sits on the board of Vital Voices Southern Cone and supports other female executives. From that experience came her idea of conscious leadership, where the choice of words, personal example and the ability to listen all matter.

On education, she has one recurring piece of advice drawn from her own experience: complement a basic degree with specific knowledge of the business. She did so through a postgraduate program in Electricity and Natural Gas Markets at ITBA, encouraged by a boss from her early years, a nuclear engineer trained at Instituto Balseiro who led with a degree of openness unusual in Argentina in the 1990s. He became her mentor, although he never knew it.

A voice in Argentina’s energy debate

Since June 2025, Schoua has chaired AmCham Argentina, reaching the position from a domestically owned company —an unusual detail for a chamber historically associated with U.S. businesses.

Her public diagnosis has been consistent. At the AmCham Energy Forum in August 2025, she argued that Argentina should not resign itself to being merely a commodity exporter, backing the point with data: 64% of the country’s gas production already comes from unconventional sources, and the Neuquén Basin accounts for more than 70% of that volume, while large quantities of crude oil leave the country unrefined and domestic refineries operate below capacity.

She identified the new financing structure for the Vaca Muerta Sur pipeline as a possible turning point and highlighted the bottlenecks in the electricity system: saturated transmission networks holding back renewable development, distribution systems in need of investment and thermal generation capacity awaiting renewal. She added the pressure created by energy-intensive users such as data centers and electric mobility, as well as Argentina’s potential in lithium and copper.

Her summary of what the world looks for in a supplier fits into three words: reliability, scale and clear rules. The line she repeats when opening events points in the same direction: without investment there is no development, and without clear rules there is no investment. In March 2026, she took that message to New York during Argentina Week, an event organized to attract capital to the country.

What her story offers as a leadership case

Schoua’s career challenges the idea that exceptional careers are built by jumping from company to company. She did the opposite: she remained connected to the same industrial asset for thirty years while owners, regulations and even the reference currency of the business changed, turning that permanence into accumulated knowledge.

Her story also shows a way of leading that placed learning above certainty. She has publicly acknowledged that she was too rigid at the beginning and became more flexible over time; said that some of the best advice of her career came from people who worked with her; and, when asked about her role models, did not name a famous CEO but the woman in her family who pushed her to study and become financially independent.