PM wants Portugal to export renewable energy in the future

Prime minister António Costa argues that, considering the country’s water, solar and wind resources, and successive investments in renewable energy, Portugal has the capacity to produce the energy it consumes – and, in the future, export it to other countries.

“We don’t have natural gas, oil, or fossil fuels and so we import all that energy. But we have water resources, solar, wind, and we can be us to produce the energy that we consume, and one day produce energy to become exporters,” he said this Monday, during the inauguration of Iberdrola’s gigabattery in Tâmega, referring to this investment as the energy production capacity that Portugal may come to have. “This gigabattery allows us to produce energy and import 160,000 tonnes less oil than we would have to import to produce the same amount of energy,” he stressed.

As well as oil, the 1.5 billion investment in the three dams and hydroelectric power plants of the Spanish energy company will produce energy equivalent to the Sines coal plant that was closed last year. Portugal “is free to produce energy based on coal,” he noted, adding that coal also had to be imported in order to produce energy from that source.

At the same time, Costa once again criticised some European countries for their lack of investment in renewable energy, demarcating himself from that reality by stressing that “Portugal is not dependent on Russia” for energy supply, a different reality from the European Union, which “depends a lot” on Moscow at a time when the supply of gas for next winter, through the Nord Stream gas pipeline, is at risk.