Portugal will demand that the European Commission push France for better electricity links to the Iberian Peninsula following last month’s crippling power outage, Portuguese Energy Minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said.
The low number of cross-border cables means there is less network capacity to balance out blackouts like the massive one that paralyzed Spain and Portugal in late April. Carvalho said she sees this as a European Single Market issue.
“We will involve the president of the European Commission on this to make sure that we are all integrated and … we help each other to solve the problems,” Carvalho said in an interview with the Financial Times published Sunday. “This is a European question; it’s not a question between the three countries.”
Portugal’s grid is highly integrated with its Spanish neighbor, which is how the power outage spread easily westward. Spain, in turn, is connected by just a few lines to France.
