Portugal goes after France in energy link dispute following blackout
(MENAFN) Portugal is seeking European Commission intervention in a dispute with France over restricted electricity transfers, according to a report by the Financial Times. The conflict follows a massive blackout on April 28 that left millions in Spain, Portugal, and southern France without power for up to ten hours.
Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho criticized France for not completing key electricity interconnections with Spain, which she argues worsened the blackout by limiting cross-border energy assistance. The outage is being called one of the most severe in recent European history.
Carvalho believes the European Commission has the legal authority to mediate under EU regulations and urged it to act, stressing that the lack of adequate connections between France and Spain continues to disrupt the EU’s internal energy market.
“This is not just a regional issue—it’s a European issue,” she stated, adding that EU President Ursula von der Leyen should be involved to ensure better integration. She called on the Commission to use its powers to pressure France into accelerating work on energy infrastructure.
The FT highlighted that the Iberian Peninsula remains among the EU's least connected regions in terms of electricity. During the April blackout, interconnectors between France and Spain were automatically shut down to protect the broader European grid after failures began spreading through Spain’s system.
Spanish Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen said preliminary findings show the disruption began with power generation failures in the provinces of Granada, Badajoz, and Seville. A technical report from Entso-E, the European network of transmission operators, revealed that 2.2 gigawatts of capacity dropped offline in southern Spain seconds before the entire grid collapsed. Investigations into the root cause of the substation malfunctions are ongoing.
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