Latest news with #MariadaGracaCarvalho
Hindustan Times
22-05-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Portugal wants European regulators' agency to lead Iberia outage investigation
LISBON, - 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".
Reuters
21-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Spain, Portugal ask EU to push for power links with France after outage
BRUSSELS, May 21 (Reuters) - Spain and Portugal have asked the European Union to step in to push for more power interconnectors with France, after a massive power outage hit the Iberian Peninsula last month, a letter seen by Reuters showed. Spain and Portugal have limited power linkages to the rest of Europe and have said France has held up new interconnection projects that they say could help prevent disruptions like the unprecedented power outage that hit most of the Iberian Peninsula. 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. In the letter to EU energy commissioner Dan Jorgensen, sent on Wednesday and seen by Reuters, Spain and Portugal's governments urged Brussels to step in to ensure new interconnection projects move ahead. "A firm political and financial commitment is needed, at all levels, in order to ensure the swift and effective integration of the Iberian Peninsula into the EU energy system," said the letter, signed by Spanish energy minister Sara Aagesen and Portuguese energy minister Maria da Graca Carvalho. "Spain and Portugal propose a ministerial meeting during this year in which, together with France and the Commission, we can agree on a roadmap with specific milestones and steps to be taken," the letter said. A European Commission spokesperson confirmed it had received the letter and was in touch with the governments. A spokesperson for France's energy minister did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter. French grid operator RTE has studied the feasibility of building two additional interconnections with Spain over the Pyrenees in its multi-annual planning document published earlier this year. RTE's planning report said it would expect the EU to contribute financing to any such upgrades, given the goal would be increased interconnection to Spain, "with the beneficiaries being located outside France." France produces most of its power from nuclear plants, while Iberia uses a bigger share of renewable sources, whose fluctuating generation increases the need for flexibility in the power grid. Iberia lags below the EU's target for countries to connect 15% of their electricity capacity to neighbouring countries by 2030 - with Iberia's share stuck at just 3%. Spain and Portugal have argued this is driving up prices, and hampering their power grids' ability to respond to disruptions. Interconnectors can help stabilise energy grids by allowing power to flow between countries to respond quickly to supply and demand fluctuations. "Accelerating the completion of electricity interconnections with the Iberian Peninsula must be placed among the highest priorities," the letter said. Power outages of the magnitude seen in Spain and Portugal last month are rare in Europe. The blackout caused massive disruptions, grounding planes and forcing hospitals to suspend routine operations. The EU is investigating its cause. A spokesperson for Spain's energy ministry and a spokesperson for Portugal's energy ministry each confirmed their ministers signed the letter.
Reuters
02-05-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Portugal's power exchanges with Spain remain suspended amid blackout probe
LISBON, May 2 (Reuters) - Portugal is supplying electricity to clients from its own sources as power exchanges with Spain remain suspended amid an inquiry into the causes of a blackout earlier this week, the energy minister said on Friday. Spain suffered a catastrophic outage in its electricity grid on Monday, which also provoked an outage across Portugal which was importing cheaper renewable energy from its neighbour. Make sense of the latest ESG trends affecting companies and governments with the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter. Sign up here. "For now, we continue without exchanging electricity with Spain as a precaution, showing the independence we have at the moment," acting Energy Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho told reporters after an online meeting with her Spanish counterpart Sara Aagesen. "It will take some time to understand exactly what happened," she said, without saying when power exchanges could be resumed, although physical interconnections between the two countries have already been re-established. The minister said she had asked European Commissioner for Energy Dan Jorgensen to produce an interim report "much more quickly" than the six months usually required. She said the authorities still had "no idea" what caused the outage, with millions of bits of data yet to be analysed by independent experts in Portugal, Spain and Europe. The two countries have agreed to jointly identify the causes of the blackout and measures to prevent such outages in the future, Aagesen said separately. Da Graca Carvalho said Portugal would make an effort to make its electricity system more resilient and for it to recover more quickly from an outage, after it took 10 hours on Monday, which was already "an exemplary recovery". "No one can be 100% protected from an event of this kind".
Local Spain
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Local Spain
Spain and Portugal to jointly probe Iberian blackout
One of Europe's biggest ever blackouts disrupted millions of lives in Spain and Portugal on Monday, cutting telephone and internet access, halting public transport and plunging cities into darkness. But no firm cause for the power outage has yet emerged. "We will collaborate to identify the causes of the incident and implement the necessary measures to ensure this doesn't happen again," said Spain's Minister of Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen, following a meeting with her Portuguese counterpart, Maria da Graca Carvalho. The two officials agreed to act in a "coordinated" manner in their exchanges with European authorities on the matter. Four days after the power outage plunged both countries into chaos for several hours, authorities and experts have yet to provide an official explanation for its causes. "It is very important to gather all the information to understand what triggered the incident, which, as you know, occurred on the Spanish electricity transmission network," the Portuguese minister said. "This is something very complex and it will therefore take some time. We need a lot of data to understand exactly what happened," she told Portuguese media outlets. Madrid has said that the equivalent of 60 percent of Spain's electricity consumption, or 15 gigawatts, disappeared within five seconds during the outage -- a phenomenon the government described as "unprecedented". Among the several hypotheses that have been put forward, Spanish authorities said they were investigating a potential cyberattack. However, Spain's electricity grid operator (REE) has deemed this scenario unlikely and said Tuesday it had detected "no intrusion" in its control systems. In its account of the events, REE said it had identified as a possible origin of the blackout two separate incidents, which occurred one and a half seconds apart. One of them may have affected a solar power production in Spain's southwest, REE said.
