Portugal pitches Morocco cable without a route

Portugal's energy minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, said on 6 July that an electricity cable to Morocco remains "on the table" (Correio da Manhã). Portugal has not published a route, a capacity figure, a cost estimate or a financing plan. Days earlier, the country opened a real interconnector (a cross-border power line linking two grids), and that contrast reveals why the Morocco cable is diplomatic signalling, not infrastructure.

The upgrade that exists, and the gate that stays shut

Spain and Portugal opened a new 400 kV link through Galicia on 2 July, adding roughly 1,000 MW of exchange capacity (La Voz de Galicia, Eco). Named operators, a defined route, measurable power. That is what a real project looks like.

The hard limit sits further north. Iberia's connection with the rest of Europe runs below 3% of installed capacity, far from the EU's 15% target for 2030 (Infobae/EFE, European Commission). The chokepoint is the Pyrenees crossing into France. A Bay of Biscay submarine link, the main project meant to fix it, is still pending. Spain, Portugal, France and the Commission will meet in September to try to accelerate it (Europa Press).

A cable from Morocco would add a southern entry point into the shared Iberian grid. But any power trying to reach central Europe still squeezes through France. France controls Iberia's main route into the wider EU market. A new southern door does not open the northern gate.

What real projects cost

The closest comparator is Italy's ELMED project, a planned cable between Sicily and Tunisia. ELMED has named transmission operators (Terna and STEG), a defined seabed route, EU co-funding and backing from the EIB and World Bank (fr.allAfrica). The project runs to about €1.42 billion for 600 MW over roughly 220 km, including €307 million from the EU's Connecting Europe Facility (Industry EMEA, kikai-news). Portugal-Morocco has none of these public elements.

A longer route across a deeper strait would probably cost more. The question nobody has answered is who pays. Costs for cross-border cables typically land on some mix of household electricity bills, EU grants and congestion revenues (the fees generated when limited cable capacity makes prices differ on either side of a border). No published analysis shows the split.

Black start fixes the wrong problem

Carvalho also claimed Portugal now has four plants with black-start capability, meaning generators that can restart without drawing power from the grid after a total collapse (Correio da Manhã). EU rules require operators to maintain this kind of restoration capacity (EU Restoration Code). It is genuinely useful for recovery.

But black start helps after a collapse. Preventing one requires different services: voltage control, frequency response and balancing. These keep electricity at the right pressure and rhythm while supply and demand shift every second. According to ENTSO-E's post-blackout analysis of the April 2025 Iberian outage (ENTSO-E coordinates Europe's transmission operators), the main failure was voltage control, not a shortage of generation. Black-start plants and capacity payments sit in separate layers. Neither replaces the real-time services that stop the lights going out.

Morocco is building storage and renewable capacity with World Bank support (World Bank), but an export cable also needs a stable, balanced source grid that Morocco has not yet completed. If a cable were eventually built, consumers on both sides could gain from cheaper power during tight hours, provided the price gap between the two markets justifies billions in costs. No public analysis has tested that.

The Morocco interconnector is strategically relevant and technically plausible in outline. It is also economically undocumented. Until named operators, a route and a financing plan become public, this is post-blackout diplomacy, not energy planning.