Portugal and Spain have agreed to participate jointly in meetings with France on energy interconnections, arguing that the issue is European and not just between the Iberian Peninsula and France, the environment ministers announced on Wednesday.
“We agreed to have a joint presence at the negotiation meetings with France and to ask the European Commission to treat this as a European issue and not between the Iberian Peninsula and France,” said the Minister of Environment and Energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, in a joint conference with the Minister of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge of Spain, Teresa Ribera, at the Ministry of Environment, in Lisbon, after a bilateral meeting on various topics, including the environment, water management and energy.
Maria da Graça Carvalho, who met her Spanish counterpart for the third time in three months, said that the issue of energy interconnections is also extremely important for the countries of Central Europe.
“If we want a European market, this issue must be resolved. and it is a European issue and we will talk to you [Ursula] von der Leyen, who we hope will be re-elected [presidente da Comissão Europeia] on the 18th, to help us achieve this goal of the European electricity and energy market,” said the Portuguese minister.
Teresa Ribera recalled that during the energy crisis, aggravated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Spain and Portugal were unable to help the rest of the European countries “because they had a weak interconnection” with the rest of Europe.
Portugal and Spain are developing a Project to increase the interconnection capacity between the regions of Miño and GaliciaThis will allow for a more efficient operation of the Iberian electricity market (Mibel), with connections also planned between Spain and France, in particular via the Bay of Biscay.
The gas pipeline between the Spanish cities of Barcelona and the French city of Marseille (BarMar) to transport energy between the Iberian Peninsula and France was announced in 2022 and is estimated to take between five and seven years to build.
In October 2022, Portugal and Spain reached an agreement with France to build new connections to transport green hydrogen, one between Celorico da Beira and Zamora (CelZa) and another between Barcelona and Marseille (BarMar), in a project called H2MED.
Source: Observadora
