Portugal’s Morocco cable lacks 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). For now, that is where it remains. Lisbon has not published a route, a capacity figure, a cost estimate or a financing plan.

A few days earlier, Portugal opened something rather more concrete: a working interconnector, meaning a cross-border power line that lets two electricity grids trade power. The contrast matters. In energy policy, a cable with a route, operators and megawatts attached is infrastructure. A cable without them is diplomacy.

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). It has named operators, a defined route and measurable power flows. That is what a real project looks like.

The harder problem lies further north. Iberia's connection with the rest of Europe is still below 3% of installed capacity, a long way from the EU's 15% target for 2030 (Infobae/EFE, European Commission). The bottleneck is the Pyrenees crossing into France. A submarine link through the Bay of Biscay, the main project meant to ease that constraint, is still pending. Spain, Portugal, France and the Commission will meet in September to try to move it along (Europa Press).

A Morocco cable would create a southern entry point into the shared Iberian grid. But electricity trying to reach central Europe would still have to pass through France. France controls Iberia's main route into the wider EU power market. Opening a southern door does not, by itself, unlock the northern one.

What real projects cost

The nearest comparison 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 support from the EIB and World Bank (fr.allAfrica). It is expected to cost 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 those public building blocks.

A longer route across a deeper strait would probably be dearer. The unanswered question is who would pay. Cross-border cables are usually funded through some combination of household electricity bills, EU grants and congestion revenues, which are the fees generated when limited cable capacity leaves prices different on each side of a border. No public analysis has shown how that burden would be split.

Black start fixes the wrong problem

Carvalho also said 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 grid operators to maintain this kind of restoration capacity (EU Restoration Code). It matters, but it matters after the system has failed.

Preventing a collapse requires different services: voltage control, frequency response and balancing. These keep electricity at the right pressure and rhythm as supply and demand move second by second. According to ENTSO-E's post-blackout analysis of the April 2025 Iberian outage, ENTSO-E being the body that 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 of the system. They do not replace the real-time services that keep the lights on.

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

The Morocco interconnector is strategically relevant and technically plausible in outline. It is also economically undocumented. Until operators, a route and a financing plan are named, this is post-blackout diplomacy rather than energy planning.