Portugal to demand EU put pressure on France over power connectors

Portugal will demand that the European Commission push France for better electricity links to the Iberian Peninsula following last month's crippling power outage, Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said.

The low number of cross-border cables means there is less network capacity to balance out blackouts like the massive one that paralyzed Spain and Portugal in late April. Carvalho said she sees this a European Single Market issue.

“We will involve the president of the European Commission on this to make sure that we are all integrated and ... we help each other to solve the problems,” Carvalho said in an interview with the Financial Times published Sunday. “This is a European question; it’s not a question between the three countries.”

Portugal’s grid is highly integrated with its Spanish neighbor, which is how the power outage spread easily westward. Spain, in turn, is connected by just a few lines to France.

Nuclear-friendly France is, according to Spain and Portugal at least, is delaying new links to prevent cheap solar and wind energy from flooding the French market. French grid operator RTE denies this. Both a cable via the Bay of Biscay and an overland powerline should address the shortage.

“France has no interest in accelerating our interconnections for its nuclear energy,” Carvalho told El País last week in an interview where she also called for pressure from Brussels.

“Having an interconnected system is good for everyone,” a senior EU official explained last month, adding that connections make it easier to manage dramatic power-supply changes.

The European Parliament last week voted in favor of a resolution calling for a major expansion of power connections across the bloc. “The Iberian blackout shows painfully how vulnerable our grids still are,” Anna Stürgkh, the lead MEP on the file, told POLITICO.

The Austrian liberal called on the Commission in Brussels to “act decisively to prioritize planning and coordination on grids and storage.” Otherwise, “we’ll keep lurching from one crisis to the next,” she said.

Gabriel Gavin contributed to this report.