Maria da Graça Carvalho Promotes Alexandre Santos to Lead DGEG and Names Nuno Matias to Stand Up the New AGE Energy Super-Agency Merging Six State Bodies

The Ministério do Ambiente e Energia (Ministry of Environment and Energy), led by Maria da Graça Carvalho, has named Alexandre Santos as director-general of the DGEG (Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia, Directorate-General for Energy and Geology), filling the post vacated by Paulo Carmona after his 1 June election to the presidency of Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP, the state-owned road and rail infrastructure operator).

Alexandre Santos has served as sub-director-general of the DGEG since October 2024 and steps into the substituição interina (interim substitution) role at the head of the agency. Maria da Graça Carvalho also named Liliana Santos to the sub-director-general post on the same substitution basis; Liliana Santos joined the DGEG in July 2025 and has run the cabinet supporting the director-general since September of that year. In its communiqué, the ministry framed the appointments as ensuring "the continuity of leadership of the DGEG at a particularly relevant moment for the execution of public policies on energy, geological resources and energy transition."

The AGE installation commission lines up alongside

The leadership turnover at the DGEG arrives in parallel with the formal installation of the new AGE (Agência de Geologia, Geological and Energy Agency) — the energy super-agency approved in principle by the Conselho de Ministros (Council of Ministers) on 26 November 2024 and now moving into the build-out phase. The AGE consolidates six existing state energy and geology bodies into a single agency:

• the DGEG itself;
• LNEG (Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia, the National Laboratory for Energy and Geology);
• ADENE (Agência para a Energia, the Energy Agency);
• EDM (Empresa de Desenvolvimento Mineiro, the Mining Development Company);
• EDMi (Empresa de Projetos Imobiliários, the real-estate arm associated with EDM);
• and ENSE (Entidade Nacional para o Setor Energético, the National Entity for the Energy Sector, which manages strategic petroleum reserves).

The minister named Nuno Matias — an economist who has led the petroleum-reserves unit at ENSE — to chair the AGE installation commission, with Antonieta Loureiro as vice-president. In the ministry's framing, the commission "brings together recognised experience in the energy, public administration, management, regulation, industry, mineral-resources and organisational-transformation sectors, providing the competences needed to lead the installation process and the integration of the constituent entities."

Part of the wider state-energy reshuffle

The DGEG and AGE leadership moves sit inside a wider state-energy reshuffle. Paulo Carmona's move to Infraestruturas de Portugal places the former DGEG chief atop the country's largest rail and road infrastructure operator from 1 June. The AGE consolidation, meanwhile, is part of the broader Reforma da Administração Pública (Public Administration Reform) push aimed at reducing the number of standalone state energy bodies — an ambition that has surfaced periodically in OE (Orçamento do Estado, State Budget) documents over the past decade but never previously moved to execution.

For the energy-policy stack, the unification lines up against three near-term workstreams. The new mecanismo de capacidade (capacity mechanism) for electricity-system security announced by the Government earlier on Monday will need DGEG implementing-decree and tariff-modelling work to translate the headline framework into operational rules. The PRR (Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, Recovery and Resilience Plan) clean-energy investment lines continue to feed through the 31 August 2026 milestone window covered in our 14 June piece, with DGEG sign-offs sitting on multiple disbursement gates. And the ongoing national transposition of the EU Electricity Market Design Reform package — adopted at European level in 2024 — needs a stable DGEG to anchor the regulatory output.

Stable institutional leadership at the DGEG through the AGE installation period — likely a 12-to-18-month build-out before the merged agency stands up on a unified statutory basis — will frame how the next OE2027 energy envelope is structured and how the Hytlantic FID, the MadoquaPower2X Sines green-hydrogen complex and the Neogreen pipeline (each covered in our 14 June Block 2 piece on the Sines hydrogen cluster) interact with a consolidated regulator. The substituição interina footing for both Alexandre Santos and Liliana Santos signals that the ministry views these appointments as bridging arrangements through the AGE transition rather than as long-run mandates — and that further restructuring may follow once the new agency is formally constituted.