Portugal blames France for delays to power links after Iberian blackout

Portugal will appeal to the European Commission to pressure France over cross-border electricity links after a blackout last month, claiming that French delays on new connections have left the Iberian peninsula vulnerable, Report informs via Financial Times.

The catastrophic outage, which began in Spain and took down Portugal’s electricity system, has reignited long-standing tensions over interconnections for trading power with France.

Madrid has yet to determine the root cause of the blackout on April 28 but some experts argue more power links to France would have made Spain part of a bigger and sturdier network, better able to withstand the initial shocks.

Portugal’s energy minister Maria da Graça Carvalho told the Financial Times that insufficient interconnections between France and Spain represented a “barrier” to the EU’s internal market, which meant European law gave Brussels the power to intervene.

“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,” said Carvalho, whose government is seeking another term in an election on Sunday. “This is a European question, it’s not a question between the three countries.”

The Iberian peninsula has some of the lowest levels of connectivity to the rest of the EU and France-Spain power links automatically disconnected to protect the wider grid on April 28, after the Spanish system began to collapse.