Portugal blames France for delays to power links after Iberian blackout

Portugal will appeal to the European Commission to pressure France over cross-border electricity links after a blackout last month, claiming that French delays on new connections have left the Iberian peninsula vulnerable.

The catastrophic outage, which began in Spain and took down Portugal’s electricity system, has reignited long-standing tensions over interconnections for trading power with France.

Madrid has yet to determine the root cause of the blackout on April 28 but some experts argue more power links to France would have made Spain part of a bigger and sturdier network, better able to withstand the initial shocks.

Portugal’s energy minister Maria da Graça Carvalho told the Financial Times that insufficient interconnections between France and Spain represented a “barrier” to the EU’s internal market, which meant European law gave Brussels the power to intervene.

“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,” said Carvalho, whose government is seeking another term in an election on May 18. “This is a European question, it’s not a question between the three countries.”

The Iberian peninsula has some of the lowest levels of connectivity to the rest of the EU and France-Spain power links automatically disconnected to protect the wider grid on April 28, after the Spanish system began to collapse.

Madrid has for decades accused Paris of standing in the way of more electricity connections between the two countries, with suspicions it wants to shield France’s nuclear power plants from an influx of cheap Spanish solar and wind energy.

The French energy minister declined to comment. France’s grid operator, RTE, has rejected the idea it was blocking progress on cross-border links.

Xavier Piechaczyk, president of RTE, said: “We have always treated interconnections with Spain as a very serious issue, one on which there are French and European commitments. So it is wrong to say that France is not a driving force in interconnections with Spain.”

Piechaczyk pointed out that work was under way on a new connection via the Bay of Biscay, due to be completed in 2028, which will double the interconnection capacity between France and Spain to 5 gigawatts. A possible link between Landes in France and Navarre in Spain was given an €11mn EU grant for initial studies in January.

However, Nicolas Goldberg, an energy expert at Colombus Consulting, said “France hasn’t always been very accommodating on interconnections”.

He added that “strong biodiversity concerns” about the impact of construction in the Pyrenees mountain range had also slowed new projects.

Spain’s energy and environment ministry said more interconnections were a “priority” and that it was working “jointly” with France and the commission on the issue.

Insufficient interconnections between France and Spain represented a ‘barrier’ to the EU’s internal market, said Portugal’s energy minister Maria da Graça Carvalho © Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg

Despite the commission decreeing in 2015 that the EU should have a fully integrated energy market, the goal is yet to be achieved.

“If there is a breach of the internal market, the European Commission can act,” Carvalho said. “We have to put it in this perspective as . . . an internal market question, because it’s there that the European Commission can put pressure on France to speed up this interconnection.”

The commission has in the past opened legal proceedings over grid connections between EU countries, but there have been none related to the Iberian peninsula or that cite internal market rules. An EU official said interconnectors across the Pyrenees were, however, “a priority for the commission”.

Portugal is taking the fight to France even as it continues to put a post-blackout limit on its own imports of Spanish electricity, a “precaution” that has driven up Portuguese electricity prices.

Portugal was importing 35 per cent of its electricity from Spain on the morning of April 28 because of the low cost of Spanish solar power.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has dismissed arguments that his country’s dependence on renewables was to blame for the widespread blackout.

Brussels in 2002 set targets for member states to have an electricity import capacity equal to 10 per cent of their domestic generation by 2020 and for that figure to reach 15 per cent by 2030. Madrid says the France-Spain connection is below 3 per cent.

By Khagan Isayev