Portugal recommends 72‑hour autonomy

Portugal’s parliament is pushing for hospitals and other critical services to be able to run for 72 hours without the grid. (eco.sapo.pt) The recommendation comes from the parliamentary working group that examined the blackout of April 28, 2025, which cut power across Portugal and Spain. The group’s draft report was led by Paulo Moniz, a lawmaker from the center-right Social Democratic Party. (jornaleconomico.sapo.pt) (eco.sapo.pt) The proposal says the most critical infrastructure should have at least 72 hours of energy autonomy, while other critical sites should have no less than 24 hours. It also calls for mandatory periodic audits with results reported publicly. (eco.sapo.pt) (jornaleconomico.sapo.pt) The list of affected sites in the report includes hospitals, health centers, care homes and emergency structures. The draft also says food retailers and pharmacies should be formally integrated into Portugal’s critical-infrastructure framework. (eco.sapo.pt) (jornaleconomico.sapo.pt) Lawmakers also want Portugal to revisit fuel-storage rules for critical sites and food retail. The current limit is 500 liters, the report says, compared with up to 3,000 liters allowed in some other European countries. (jornaleconomico.sapo.pt) The report cites testimony from the president of Portugal’s energy regulator, ERSE, who said resilience should be secured locally, selectively and cost-effectively rather than by oversizing the grid. That points toward backup generation, batteries and site-level power systems instead of relying only on transmission upgrades. (eco.sapo.pt) The blackout that triggered this debate began at 12:33 CEST on April 28, 2025, and became the most severe blackout in the European grid in more than two decades. ENTSO-E, the European network of transmission system operators, said the outage affected continental Spain and Portugal and briefly spilled into southwestern France. (ec.europa.eu) (entsoe.eu) ENTSO-E’s final report in March 2026 said the blackout was caused by a combination of interacting factors, including oscillations, gaps in voltage and reactive power control, rapid output reductions and generator disconnections in Spain. The report said the fixes include stronger operating practices, better system monitoring and closer coordination across the grid. (entsoe.eu) Portugal’s government had already started moving in that direction last year. Energy minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said in June 2025 that the blackout had exposed weaknesses and that the government was studying renewable generation with batteries for health centers and communications systems, while doubling black-start-capable power plants to four. (portugalresident.com) The backdrop is broader than Portugal. A new analysis in The Conversation says climate-linked extremes are colliding with grids built for older operating conditions, while weather risk and price risk increasingly overlap in modern energy insecurity. (theconversation.com) Portugal’s 72-hour recommendation turns that abstract risk into a concrete procurement rule: keep enough on-site power, fuel or storage to ride through a long outage. The next step is whether the government turns the parliamentary report into binding regulation. (eco.sapo.pt)