Portugal targets France in power link dispute after blackout

Lisbon has reportedly asked the European Commission to pressure Paris over the stalled expansion of electricity supplies following the recent ten-hour outage.

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.

Image credit: Aldward Castillo