Latest news with #MariaDaGracaCarvalho
Reuters
27-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Portugal wants EU to pressure reluctant France on power connections
CASCAIS, Portugal, May 27 (Reuters) - The EU must enforce common market rules to integrate the Iberian peninsula's power grid into wider Europe, overcoming France's reluctance to add interconnections, Portugal said on Tuesday, after a massive blackout hit the peninsula last month. The blackout, which started in Spain and also left mainland Portugal without electricity on April 28, could have been less crippling had the two countries had more interconnections to resume power supplies rather than just relying on their own power plants, according to experts and officials. Last Wednesday, the energy ministers of Spain and Portugal sent a letter to the EU energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen asking him to step in. "France has a lot of nuclear energy and does not have a great interest in importing cheaper renewable energy from Iberia," Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Cascais, near Lisbon. But the European Commission can "pressure" France to comply with the rules of the EU electricity market, she added. "If we (Portugal) do something that is considered a barrier to the internal market, the Commission wastes no time in sending us a letter with a warning. So we expect the same attitude towards France," Carvalho said. Iberia lags behind the EU's target for all countries to have 15% of their energy system interconnected to the broader European network by 2030, with its share stuck at just 3%. Works to strengthen an existing interconnector between France and Spain are expected to wrap up this year, while a new underwater power line spanning the Bay of Biscay is set to be completed by 2028. Although French grid operator RTE has studied the feasibility of building two additional interconnections with Spain over the Pyrenees, Carvalho said they are not part of France's new plan until 2035, which she said "worries" her.
Bloomberg
25-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Portugal Continues Easing Limits on Power Imports From Spain
Portugal will continue to ease limits on the electricity interconnection capacity for imports from Spain after trading between the two countries was halted last month due to a blackout. The April 28 blackout left Portugal and Spain without electricity for hours, hitting public transport, telecommunications systems and other services. Portuguese Energy and Environment Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho said on May 2 that as a precaution Portugal was at that time not trading electricity with Spain and was being supplied entirely with power produced within the country.
Reuters
22-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Portugal wants European regulators' agency to lead Iberia outage investigation
LISBON, May 22 (Reuters) - Portugal wants European energy regulators' agency ACER to lead an independent investigation into the causes of the huge power outage that brought most of Spain and Portugal to a standstill last month, its acting energy minister told Reuters. Maria da Graca Carvalho said Prime Minister Luis Montenegro wants an independent investigation led by the European Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators to complement the technical report being prepared by the European network of transmission system operators ENTSO-E. "ACER, as a suitable entity to coordinate any external evaluation process, could bring more confidence, impartiality and transparency to the conclusions," Carvalho said in an e-mail, responding to questions from Reuters. "As for speculation about cyber attacks, sabotage or human error, at this time there is no evidence" that any of those could have caused the outage, the minister told Reuters in a written statement. Spain's energy minister said last week that an abrupt loss of power generation at a site in Granada, followed by outages seconds later in Badajoz and Seville, triggered the unprecedented blackout across Spain and Portugal on April 28. Iberia lags behind the EU's target for all countries to have 15% of their energy system interconnected to the broader European network by 2030, with Iberia's share stuck at just 3%. Carvalho said that, regardless of the causes of the blackout, Portugal was pondering how to strengthen the resilience and security of the national electricity system, which is a "strategic imperative".
Bloomberg
21-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Spain, Portugal Urge EU Effort on Power Link After Blackout
Spain and Portugal have called on the European Union to accelerate the completion of a cross-border power connection with the Iberian Peninsula after a recent blackout highlighted risks for the region's electricity supply. A planned interconnector with France must be 'urgently completed,' Spanish Energy Minister Sara Aagesen Munoz and her Portuguese counterpart Maria da Graca Carvalho wrote in a letter to EU energy chief Dan Jorgensen. The link operates at just 3% capacity, well below its planned 15% target for 2030, posing a systemic risk to the overall European energy system, they said.
Russia Today
18-05-2025
- Business
- Russia Today
Portugal targets France in power link dispute after blackout
Portugal plans to ask the European Commission to pressure France over limited electricity supplies from the latter, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing Energy Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho. The move follows the April 28 blackout that left millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France without electricity for up to ten hours. Portugal is reportedly blaming Paris for failing to complete and expand critical electricity interconnections with Spain – shortcomings that Lisbon argues exacerbated the blackout by restricting cross-border energy support. The power outage has been described as the largest in recent European history. Carvalho claims that Brussels has the authority to arbitrate the matter under EU law, noting that the weak interconnections between France and Spain continue to hamper the bloc's internal energy market. 'We will involve the president of the EC on this to make sure that we are all integrated,' she said, expressing hope for a resolution. 'This is a European question, it's not a question between the three countries.' She urged the Commission to step in if the internal market is being compromised, emphasizing its power to pressure France into accelerating work on infrastructure. The Iberian Peninsula has some of the lowest energy connectivity levels in the EU, the FT noted. Power links between France and Spain were automatically disconnected to safeguard the wider European grid after Spain's system began to fail. Earlier this week, Spanish Minister for Ecological Transition Sara Aagesen said an initial investigation had revealed that the chain reaction of grid disconnections were triggered by power generation failures in the provinces of Granada, Badajoz, and Seville. A preliminary technical assessment by Entso-E, the European association of transmission system operators, reported that 2.2 gigawatts of capacity went offline in southern Spain less than a minute before the full system collapse. The root causes of the substation failures remain under investigation.
