Minister of Environment and Energy address conference on electricity security
Acting minister for environment and energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, has told a conference in Lisbon that there are no guarantees that Portugal won’t suffer another power blackout like the one that paralysed the country last month.
“Honestly, nobody can say that we won’t experience a blackout like the one on April 28 again. There’s no guarantee of that. But we can do everything in our power to prevent such an event and, above all, drastically mitigate its effects should it happen”, the minister said at the opening of the event “Strategy and Electricity Security for Portugal”, organised by the Order of Engineers (OE).
Reinforcing investment in networks, storage and system services were some of the points highlighted by Ms Carvalho to prevent a similar generalised power outage, or at least its effects.
“There are certainly aspects where we could have been better, lessons to be learnt. This event should lead us to improve our energy system,’ she said, reinforcing the official mantra that there is “still no diagnosis of what really happened.
“We know that the cause was external to Portugal,” she added – a feature that was consistently cited from the get-go.
How to avoid further power outages?
What is needed is to “guarantee the evolution and adaptation of the electricity system to a new paradigm, based on renewable production and decentralisation, which naturally creates challenges”, said the minister, citing efforts already ongoing as addressing “the challenge associated with data collection and management, whose volume and complexity require more advanced and digital solutions. And the challenge of guaranteeing the capacity of the electricity system to oppose changes in frequency – the so-called inertia – as well as the flexibility needed to manage the network to ensure its reliability and resilience”.
As for the direction to take, the country already has a clear course and ‘clear actions’, she said.
“We have approved a National Energy and Climate Plan (PNEC 2030), which reinforces the commitment to renewables and also has the strengthening of security of supply as one of its strategic objectives, and in February we published the Security of Supply Monitoring Report for the National Electricity System 2025-2040, which shows our attention to this issue”.
Blackstart capacity doubled
The minister also referred to the decision to extend the country’s blackstart service at the Tapada do Outeiro power station by March 31, 2026.
“We were already working on the decision, which has now been reinforced, to double the blackstart capacity, maintaining this feature at Tapada do Outeiro and Castelo de Bode, while REN will activate the blackstart service with the Baixo Sabor and Alqueva hydroelectric power stations for a period of five years,” she said.
The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) announced the creation of a committee to investigate the causes of the blackout very shortly after systems were fully recovered. Its panel of experts will have to draw up a factual report that will form the basis of the final report given a deadline of October 28, this year (exactly six months from the date of the blackout). The final ‘full technical report’ on the investigation into the incident must be published by September 30, 2026 (almost a year later) “at the latest”.
Source material: LUSA/ SIC Notícias
