<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The blackout that affected the entire Iberian Peninsula on Monday has once again highlighted Spain's difficulties in achieving the binding target of 15 percent electricity interconnection capacity by 2030, due, among other factors, to France's resistance to opening its energy market to competition from gas and renewables from Spain.</strong></h4> President of the Governmen Pedro Sánchez stated on Monday night, after the second meeting of the National Security Council, that the restoration of the 50 percent national electricity supply achieved at that time had been possible thanks to "the interconnections with France and Morocco, the combined cycle gas plants, and the hydroelectric plants." Therefore, Red Eléctrica was forced to rely on the reduced interconnections with France and Morocco to reactivate the supply. Currently, connections with France only guarantee 3,000 megawatts (MW), and those with Morocco do not even reach half that (1,400 MW). The limited interconnection between Spain and Portugal and the rest of Europe has turned the Iberian Peninsula into an "energy island" within the EU. This factor was one of the arguments used by Madrid and Lisbon to defend before the European Council the so-called "Iberian mechanism," which allowed the two countries, between June 2022 and December 2023, to manage their own reference gas prices for combined-cycle power plants and to establish a cap of €40 per megawatt/hour on the price of gas used to produce electricity, at a time of booming energy prices resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Portuguese government was headed at the time by the current President of the European Council, António Costa. Aside from the temporary benefits that Spain and Portugal may have obtained at that time, the truth is that the two countries remain an "energy island" due to their extremely low electrical interconnections with Europe, which are well below the 15 percent target established in 2017 by the European Commission (specifically at Spain's proposal) for 2030. Last October, the 35th Spanish-Portuguese Summit, held in the Portuguese town of Faro, concluded with the two governments pledging to ask France and the European Commission to facilitate rail and energy interconnections between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. In statements to the press after the summit, Pedro Sánchez warned of the need to "strengthen energy interconnections" and asserted that, thanks to the high degree of energy integration between the two countries, driven by the "Iberian Electricity Market," Spain and Portugal meet all the conditions to transform the Iberian Peninsula into "a major global renewable energy hub." For his part, Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro called for the fulfillment of "the commitments established between Portugal, Spain, France, and the European Commission regarding energy interconnections, in particular, and above all, electricity interconnections," because "it is unacceptable for us to always defend and discuss the same issues when they are assumed as a commitment in solemn documents that bind our states." A few months earlier, in July 2024, Teresa Ribera, then Third Vice President and Minister for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge and current European Executive Vice President for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, called for greater European Commission involvement to ensure that the Iberian Peninsula ceases to be "an island" in the European energy market. "We know that mandatory minimum interconnection targets were set years ago, and there is the enormous paradox that Spain, because it is the cross-border benchmark that counts, but the Iberian Peninsula as a whole, is the least interconnected European area of all; it is an island, and that makes little sense," she stated. <div class="lRu31" dir="ltr"><span class="HwtZe" lang="en"><span class="jCAhz ChMk0b"><span class="ryNqvb">Currently, interconnection is at three percent, well below not only the 15 percent, but even the ten percent forecast for 2020. </span></span></span>As if that weren't enough, the new National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), approved by the government in 2024, postpones the completion of two new interconnections with France from 2030 to 2035. These interconnections will pass through the Pyrenees (specifically through Navarre and Aragon) and are expected to reach 8,000 MW. These delays are in addition to those already experienced by the third interconnection agreed with France, the Bay of Biscay interconnection, which is expected to reach 5,000 MW and whose commissioning will not occur before 2030, two years later than initially planned.</div>
