Lisbon, Dec. 17, 2025 (Lusa) - Portugal's electricity and natural gas network managing company, REN, stated on Wednesday in parliament that electrical interconnections with Spain have generated estimated benefits of €3.2 billion since 2021, admitting that greater integration could have prevented the Iberian blackout or extended it to Europe.
"The fact that we have been enjoying very competitive prices, with a large solar production capacity in Spain over the last four years, has allowed the Portuguese system to benefit from a very preliminary methodology that we have developed, which could be much more densified, around €3.2 billion," between 2021 and 2024, said REN's executive director, João Conceição, at the hearing of the Working Group on the nationwide power outage of 28 April 2025, at the Environment and Energy Committee.
According to Conceição, Portugal currently has "almost 5,000 megawatts" of interconnection capacity with Spain, when peak consumption is around 10,000 megawatts. "We have interconnections capable of supplying around 50% of our peak consumption," he said.
João Conceição acknowledged that, in this case, "the interconnections worked, in quotation marks, against the Portuguese system," by dragging Portugal into a problem that started in Spain, but he stressed that the overall balance is positive.
"For us, interconnections have many more advantages than risks," he said.
The director pointed out that the benefits are not only economic. "They are not only economic and financial advantages, they are also technical advantages," he said.
European electricity systems "should invest more so that we have as interconnected a network as possible," argued João Conceição.
He warned that a greater degree of interconnection could have had different effects on the April blackout. "Either it would have allowed the European system to support Spain with more muscle and effectively try to stem this loss or total collapse of the Spanish system, or, on the contrary, it would have meant that this problem would have spread to Europe," he said.
João Conceição also recalled that, in previous critical situations, interconnections were crucial in ensuring security of supply.
"During the severe drought of 2022, if it weren't for the interconnections, we would probably have had to carry out controlled consumption cuts," he said.
According to him, "naturally, the Spanish system is a much larger system, and the fact that there are more limited interconnections with the French system makes some of the issues we are talking about unfeasible."
The blackout in the Iberian Peninsula on 28 April showed the importance of increasing the resilience of the European Union (EU) energy network, at a time when the Iberian territory has less than 3% connectivity with the rest of the Union.
The Portuguese government has been advocating an increase in Portugal's energy interconnection with the rest of the EU to 15% by 2030, through the construction of more interconnections.
The strengthening of energy interconnections between Portugal and Spain and the EU has been under discussion for several years, but due to France's scepticism, it has never fully progressed, despite being important for increasing energy security, reducing dependence on fossil fuels, lowering costs and facilitating the transition to renewable energies.
The European Commission shares Portugal's view on the need to build more energy interconnections in the EU, particularly between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the bloc, and has put forward an action plan while attempting to engage in dialogue with France.
Recently, on 10 December, Brussels announced that it had chosen as future “Energy Highways”, which will receive support from the European Union, electrical interconnections between the Pyrenees and the Iberian Peninsula and a hydrogen corridor from Portugal to Germany.
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