During the second Energy Interconnector Summit between France and the Iberian Peninsula, held in Lisbon on Friday 27 July, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa agreed to build a new undersea high voltage line between France and Spain in the Bay of Biscay in order to link up their electricity networks and reduce the isolation of the Iberian Peninsula.
In this context, the European Commission signed, on Friday, an agreement for a subsidy of €578 million – the largest amount ever granted to an energy infrastructure project within the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) – in support of this project which aims to double the electricity exchange capacity between France and Spain by 2025. It also aims to bring Spain closer to the 15% objective for the interconnection of established electricity capacities (see EUROPE 12072).
Costa underlined the interest this holds for Portugal, which has an electricity production surplus, mainly of renewable origin, that it could export beyond Spain thanks to this project.
The Santa-Llogaia-Baixas/INELFE project, completed in June 2017, has made it possible to double the interconnection capacity between Spain and France (see EUROPE 12072).
Macron makes the closure of coal-fired power plants subject to having a French-Spanish gas pipeline.
On Friday, Macron, Sanchez and Costa called on national regulators to assess how relevant new gas interconnections between France and the Iberian Peninsula would be.
Macron was in favour of building a Franco-Spanish gas pipeline as long as such a project proves economically viable and is accompanied by a strategy for closure of coal-fired plants.
“Gas is only relevant to our emissions strategy if it is a substitute for coal-fired power plants, in particular [...]. If we have a real strategy for halting coal-fired plants, which shows that we are creating new opportunities for gas and that the cost identified for the gas pipeline between France and Spain in this context makes economic sense, then we shall do it”, he stressed.
Spain and Portugal, which import gas from Algeria and have seven terminals for LNG imported from Qatar and the United States, are pressing for this project.
However, a study commissioned by the European Commission on the cost and benefits of the Franco-Spanish MidCat gas pipeline project has cast a shadow on the financial viability of the project, for which the cost is evaluated at €3 billion and which has already received Community support of €5.6 million under common interest infrastructure projects (see EUROPE 12006). (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)