LISBON (Reuters) -Portugal is supplying electricity to clients from its own sources as power exchanges with Spain remain suspended amid an inquiry into the causes of a blackout earlier this week, the energy minister said on Friday.
Spain suffered a catastrophic outage in its electricity grid on Monday, which also provoked an outage across Portugal which was importing cheaper renewable energy from its neighbour.
“For now, we continue without exchanging electricity with Spain as a precaution, showing the independence we have at the moment,” acting Energy Minister Maria da Graca Carvalho told reporters after an online meeting with her Spanish counterpart Sara Aagesen.
“It will take some time to understand exactly what happened,” she said, without saying when power exchanges could be resumed, although physical interconnections between the two countries have already been re-established.
The minister said she had asked European Commissioner for Energy Dan Jorgensen to produce an interim report “much more quickly” than the six months usually required.
She said the authorities still had “no idea” what caused the outage, with millions of bits of data yet to be analysed by independent experts in Portugal, Spain and Europe.
The two countries have agreed to jointly identify the causes of the blackout and measures to prevent such outages in the future, Aagesen said separately.
Da Graca Carvalho said Portugal would make an effort to make its electricity system more resilient and for it to recover more quickly from an outage, after it took 10 hours on Monday, which was already “an exemplary recovery”.
“No one can be 100% protected from an event of this kind”.
(Reporting by Sergio Goncalves; editing by Andrei Khalip, Kirsten Donovan)
