One Billion Euros for a Power Cable to Morocco, and the Case the Minister Makes for It Is the Blackout

The electricity cable Portugal has been discussing with Morocco will only be built if private investors or the European Union pay for it. That is the position Maria da Graça Carvalho, the Minister of Environment and Energy, set out to reporters on Friday in Castro Verde, and it is a noticeably cooler description of the project than the one the two governments were giving in July.

"What was agreed between me and the [Moroccan Energy] minister is that we would go ahead if there were interest from private parties or help from the European Union," Carvalho said. Asked directly about the state of the project, she described it as "ainda é uma conversa": still a conversation.

The number, and where it comes from

Carvalho put the likely cost at around one billion euros, attributing the figure to calculations done "some years ago", and said the ministry is currently redoing them. "We are doing the calculations, it is an expensive project and the main advantage is restarting in the case of a blackout," she said.

That figure is worth handling carefully. When we covered the July meeting between Carvalho and her Moroccan counterpart, Leila Benali, the reference point on the table was a 2018 study that put a Portugal to Morocco link at roughly 800 million euros, a number officials themselves conceded was badly out of date. Friday's one billion euros is the same class of estimate, updated in round terms rather than by engineering. Nobody has a costed design, which is precisely why the ministry says it is recalculating.

The justification has shifted

This is the part of Friday's remarks that actually matters, and it is easy to miss because the headline number is louder.

In July, the case for the cable was made in the language of energy markets and the clean transition. Morocco has been building solar and wind at scale and wants to export power northward; Portugal sits at the western edge of the European grid and wants more routes to move surplus electricity in and out; a southern link would give the Iberian Peninsula a second external door beyond its long-congested connection to France. The two governments were pressing Brussels to classify the link as an Important Project of Common European Interest, a designation that loosens state aid rules and opens access to the Connecting Europe Facility.

On Friday, the minister led with something else entirely: black start. "We have an Iberian electricity market with Spain, but when there is a blackout, as there was, we had to restart on our own," she said. The cable's "main advantage", in her words, is the ability to restart the system after a total collapse.

That is a reference to the Iberian blackout of 28 April 2025, which took down the peninsula's grid and left Portugal to bring its own system back up. The event has driven a long sequence of policy since: a four-thousand-million-euro plan to rewire the national grid, a €25 million tender for storage to keep hospitals and water systems running, and a regulatory fight over compensation after ERSE classed the outage as an exceptional event. Carvalho herself has previously described the cross-border dependency from the other direction, telling an audience in Madrid that Spain supplied southern Portugal with electricity after Storm Kristin severed the north to south high-voltage line.

Framing a Moroccan interconnection as blackout insurance rather than as a clean-power corridor changes what the project has to prove. An export corridor has to be commercially attractive to whoever builds it. A restart route has to be available on the worst day of the decade, which is a resilience argument, and resilience arguments are historically difficult to fund from private capital alone.

Spain is watching

Lusa noted that the Jornal Económico reported on Friday that the submarine electricity project between Portugal and Morocco is causing concern in Spain. The minister was asked about it and did not engage with the substance, returning instead to the point that the link "is still a conversation" with her Moroccan counterpart.

The reason Madrid would take an interest is structural rather than political. Portugal and Spain share the Iberian electricity market, and Spain is currently the only land route by which power reaches Portugal from the rest of Europe; the two countries have been steadily thickening that connection, most recently by switching on a €128 million link that lifted cross-border capacity by 1,000 MW. A Portuguese cable to Morocco would open a second external door to the peninsula that does not run through Spain, and Spain already has its own interconnection with Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar.

What this actually tells you

Three things are now on the record that were not before.

First, there is no Portuguese state money attached to this project, and the minister said so without hedging. The link advances with private capital or European funding, or it does not advance.

Second, the cost has been revised upward in public, from a stale 800 million euro study to a round one billion, with the ministry openly saying the real number is not yet known.

Third, the argument has moved from exporting clean power to surviving a blackout. Both arguments can be true at once, but they appeal to different funders, and the one the minister chose to lead with on Friday is the one that is hardest to sell to a private investor.

Against the background of an electricity system that imported 36 percent of what it used in August, and a grid whose ownership the state has been quietly moving back toward itself, the interconnection question is not going away. But on Friday's account, a cable to Morocco remains a conversation with a placeholder price, not a project with a route, a builder or a budget.