Portugal blames France for blackout and asks Brussels to intervene over inadequate interconnection

Portugal will ask the European Commission to require France to ensure better electricity connections with the Iberian Peninsula following last month’s crippling power outage. Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said.

Spain, Portugal and a small part of France experienced a power outage on 28 April. Residents got to see firsthand what life would be like if they suddenly lost access to electricity. And while social media was flooded with photos of Portuguese and Spanish people enjoying the sunny weather, the situation was very serious and ultimately claimed ten lives.

Residents of Madrid, for example, had to get by without traffic lights, phone services or ATMs. Public transport was also affected. Authorities advised people to avoid driving because traffic lights had gone dark. Madrid and Lisbon airports also warned passengers to expect major delays. Supplies were gradually restored only late at night. The rest of continental Europe’s power system, meanwhile, experienced no outages.

One possible explanation is the low number of cross-border power lines connecting the Iberian Peninsula with the rest of Europe. Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho sees the situation not as a problem for the Iberian Peninsula alone, but for the entire European electricity market, according to Politico.

“We will involve the president of the European Commission to make sure that we are all connected and help each other solve problems,” Carvalho told the Financial Times.  “This is a European issue; it is not an issue between three countries.”

A swift process

Portugal’s power grid is closely integrated with neighbouring Spain, so the outage spread there easily too.

France, according to Spain and Portugal, is delaying new interconnections to prevent the French market from being flooded with cheap solar and wind power. French grid operator RTE denies this. The shortfall is expected to be addressed by both a cable across the Bay of Biscay and an overland power line.

“We have always regarded interconnection with Spain as a very important issue, one covered by French and European commitments. So it is wrong to claim that France is not driving interconnection with Spain,” RTE President Xavier Piechaczyk said, according to the Financial Times .

Piechaczyk stressed, according to the Financial Times, that work is under way on a new interconnection across the Bay of Biscay, which is due to be completed in 2028 and will double the capacity of the link between France and Spain to 5 gigawatts. A possible interconnection between France’s Landes region and Spain’s Navarre received an EU grant of 11 million euros in January for preliminary studies.

Nicolas Goldberg, an energy expert at Colombus Consulting, said that “France has not always been very cooperative on interconnections”.

He added that strong concerns about biodiversity had also slowed new projects, given the impact of construction in the Pyrenees.

An interconnected system benefits everyone

Carvalho stood by her position in an interview with El País. “France is not interested in speeding up our interconnection because of its nuclear power,” she said, calling for pressure from Brussels. The French energy minister declined to comment on the situation.

“An interconnected system is good for everyone,” a senior EU official said last month, adding that interconnection makes it easier to manage dramatic changes in energy supplies.

The European Parliament voted last week on a resolution calling for a significant expansion of energy interconnections across the bloc. “The outage on the Iberian Peninsula painfully shows how vulnerable our grids still are,” Anna Stürgkh, the lead MEP handling the document, told POLITICO.

The Austrian liberal called on the Commission in Brussels to “act decisively and prioritise planning and coordination on grids and storage”. Otherwise, “we will continue to stumble from one crisis to the next,” she said.

The power outage is now being investigated by a panel of experts established by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) , the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER), national regulatory authorities and regional coordination centres. The panel is chaired by experts from transmission system operators that were not directly affected by the incident, but affected parties and other TSOs are also included. Its aim is to examine the root causes of the blackout and make recommendations for the future.