The Minister of Environment and Energy defended this Monday, February 2, the burial of electrical lines to reinforce the resilience of the network, at a time when around 149 thousand customers remain without electricity after Storm Kristin.
Maria da Graça Carvalho was speaking at a joint press conference with the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing, Dan Jørgensen, after a bilateral meeting and a round table with representatives from the energy sector.
The minister stated that the extreme phenomena associated with climate change require structural adaptation of energy infrastructures, highlighting that Portugal currently only has around 20% of its electricity network buried.
“We have to think about our network in a different way”, stated the minister, admitting the need to increase the burial of lines, despite the increased costs, in a context in which storms of this size were rare in the past.
The minister compared the Portuguese situation with that of other European countries, such as Spain and Italy, where the percentage of underground networks reaches around 45%, defending a balanced approach between costs for consumers and taxpayers and gains in resilience. The investment required for this strategy was not detailed.
However, he added that at a European level, strengthening the resilience of Portuguese networks was discussed with the European Commission within the scope of the future European package for electrical networks (“grid package”), arguing that the needs of peripheral countries, such as Portugal, should be considered in community financing.
According to the government official, Storm Kristin caused widespread failures across the entire electrical grid chain, affecting high, medium and low voltage, leaving, on the first night, around 1.1 million customers without electricity.
“The high voltage has already been resolved, but significant problems persist in the low voltage,” he said, adding that, at the moment, supply remained to be restored to around 149 thousand customers, of which 122 thousand were residential.
According to the minister, around 100 thousand of these customers are concentrated in a single region, Leiria, and these are “the most difficult situations” to resolve, after fulfilling E-Redes’ commitment to recover 80% of the network in five days. This is despite the fact that in some areas the heavy rain and wind that was felt this morning complicated the repairs and even caused more damage.
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