Parliament's Blackout Inquiry Wants 72 Hours of Backup Power for Hospitals, Pharmacies and Food Retail — and Recommends Lifting the 500-Litre Fuel-Storage Cap to 3,000 Litres

The parliamentary working group set up after the 28 April 2025 Iberian blackout has finished the operational half of its report. The draft, written by PSD rapporteur Paulo Moniz and circulated to parliamentary groups this week, proposes that hospitals, health centres, nursing homes and emergency services be required to hold at least 72 hours of backup-power autonomy, that other critical infrastructure hold at least 24 hours, and that supermarkets and pharmacies be formally reclassified as critical infrastructure for the purpose. The report cites ENTSO-E, the European network of transmission-system operators, as the reference framework for the autonomy thresholds.

The 72-hour number is the weight-bearing piece. It is the operational lesson the inquiry took from the April 2025 event — that the time taken to restore the grid in a real cold-start scenario can run from hours into days, that hospitals on diesel generators were already approaching their tank limits when the system came back, and that the existing rule book did not give civil-protection commanders a binding minimum to plan against.

Where the 500-litre cap fails

The headline regulatory change is on fuel storage. Current ANEPC rules cap on-site emergency fuel reserves at 500 litres. The draft report calls that ceiling ‘manifestly insufficient’ for the kind of multi-day events the inquiry has been studying, and notes that other European jurisdictions allow on-site reserves of up to 3,000 litres for the same class of installation. The report does not legislate the change directly — that would be a regulatory job for ANEPC and the fire-safety inspectorate — but it asks Parliament to instruct the Government to revise the cap.

The 500-to-3,000-litre move is consequential. At full load a 500-kVA hospital generator burns roughly 100–120 litres of diesel per hour. The 500-litre cap, in practice, gives a hospital wing about four to five hours of generation before it has to refuel. A 3,000-litre cap pushes that to a day or more, which is the difference between ‘wait for the supply truck and hope’ and ‘hold the building under its own power until the grid is back’. For nursing homes — which are not allowed the on-site refuelling regime that hospitals can negotiate with their fuel supplier — the change is even more material.

Supermarkets and pharmacies move into the perimeter

The second consequential proposal is the formal reclassification of retail food distribution and pharmacies as critical infrastructure. Under the current Decreto-Lei n.º 62/2011, which transposed the European Directive on critical infrastructure protection, the Portuguese list is dominated by energy and transport — refineries, the high-voltage grid, the airports, the ports, the rail backbone and the major dam complexes. Supermarkets and pharmacies do not currently sit inside that perimeter.

The April 2025 blackout exposed the gap. Distribution-chain freezers in the largest supermarket networks ran for six to eight hours on existing in-store generators before the cold chain began to break, and pharmacy refrigerated medicine stocks sat at the same operational ceiling. The working group's proposal is that the obligations — backup generation, audited fuel reserves, restoration drills — be extended formally to the food and pharmacy networks, with the corresponding regulatory burden carried by the operators themselves rather than by the State.

That is a non-trivial shift. APED, the retailers' association, has been wary of any formal classification that brings supermarket distribution into a regulated emergency-services framework, because it pulls in audit, reporting and investment obligations the supermarket networks have so far carried voluntarily. The pharmacies' professional association has been more open, partly because the medicine-storage cold-chain argument is one ANF members already make in their own internal documentation. Whether the Government picks up the proposal in legislation will depend on the sub-committee work in the coming weeks.

What ERSE told the working group

The energy regulator ERSE, called to testify by the working group, made an argument the report adopts almost verbatim: resilience must be built ‘locally, selectively and cost-effectively’, not by over-dimensioning the grid itself. The implication is that money spent on bigger transmission lines and more redundancy at the high-voltage level will not, on its own, prevent the kind of cascade Iberia suffered last April. What stops the cascade hurting people is what happens at the load end — the hospital wing, the pharmacy fridge, the supermarket freezer, the nursing-home oxygen concentrator — and that work is local and selective by definition.

The ENTSO-E reference matters in the same way. The 72-hour and 24-hour thresholds are not a Portuguese invention; they are the European peer reference for what a functioning critical-load resilience standard looks like. By anchoring the recommendation in ENTSO-E rather than a domestic policy preference, the working group is pre-empting the standard objection that the obligations are too costly — the answer is that other European jurisdictions already meet them.

The other recommendations

Five further pieces are stitched into the draft report:

• Mandatory periodic audits of backup-generation capacity and fuel reserves at every covered facility, with the audit results publicly reported. The publication piece is unusual for the Portuguese regulatory tradition, which typically protects compliance data inside the regulator. The argument is that public visibility shifts the political incentive for compliance from inside the technical inspectorate to the public, which is the constituency that actually carries the cost of a failure.
• Fuel-supply protocols pre-tested for backup generators across the critical-infrastructure list, including written contractual commitments from the supply chain on the maximum delivery time during a generalised event.
• SIRESP review — a structural reassessment of the integrated emergency communications system used by GNR, PSP, ANEPC, INEM and the bombeiros, which underperformed at multiple points during the April 2025 event because the radio-network base stations were themselves on commercial-grid power.
• Independent emergency-alert mechanisms outside the commercial mobile networks, building on the cell-broadcast SMS system in operation since 2025 but adding a parallel channel that does not depend on operator base stations remaining live.
• Iberian operational coordination formalised, with a written cross-border protocol between Portugal's REN and Spain's REE for the cold-start sequence and the order-of-operations during a system-wide event.

What now

The draft is now with the parliamentary groups for amendment. The political signal from the PSD and PS sides has been broadly supportive on the operational substance — the disputes inside the working group, as a separate strand of Público's coverage on Saturday made clear, have been on the governance question, specifically whether the inquiry can demand documents from the Conselho de Operações da Rede Eléctrica do Governo (CORGOV) without a confidentiality wall. That governance fight is real, but it does not affect the operational recommendations; the 72-hour autonomy minimum, the 3,000-litre fuel cap and the supermarket/pharmacy reclassification stand on their own.

The next pressure point is the Government's response. ANEPC, ERSE and the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia are likely to be asked to convert the proposals into a binding regulatory package before the end of 2026. The 30 April BPCE/Novo Banco closing has been crowding out energy headlines this week, but the substantive operational reform of Portugal's blackout-response regime is now on a path Parliament can vote.

What it means for residents

For an expat household, three things follow if the report's operational recommendations are adopted in legislation. First, your nearest hospital and centro de saúde would carry an audited 72-hour backup minimum, with publicly reported results — the kind of transparency that has not existed in Portuguese civil protection until now. Second, your nearest supermarket and pharmacy would carry a 24-hour minimum and the audited reserve obligation, which means the cold chain on the food and medicine you buy locally would survive a one-day event without dependency on emergency municipal coordination. Third, the SMS alert system you receive on your phone during a civil-protection emergency would carry a parallel channel that does not collapse with the commercial mobile network when the grid does — which is the failure mode several Portuguese municipalities reported in April 2025.

None of that is law yet. The report is a recommendation; the regulation that flows from it has to be drafted and gazetted before the obligations bite. But the political path is clearer than it has been since the blackout, and the cost-of-living political logic of the moment makes the supermarket and pharmacy pieces particularly hard for any Government to walk away from.

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