The Morocco–Portugal electricity cable can now seek funding from Brussels
Morocco and Portugal now have a concrete avenue to seek financial support from the European Union for their electricity cable. Brussels has just opened applications for its new list of major cross-border energy infrastructure projects.
The European Commission launched the selection of the Union’s third list of priority energy projects on Monday, September 14. This procedure allows Morocco and Portugal to propose their future electricity interconnection so that it can obtain “project of mutual interest” status.
This classification specifically concerns infrastructure linking the European Union to a third country. If selected, the Morocco–Portugal cable could then seek European funding, notably through the Connecting Europe Facility.
This new opportunity comes as Rabat and Lisbon seek to revive a project studied for several years but held back by its cost. Portugal’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, and her Moroccan counterpart, Leila Benali, had agreed in July to request support from Brussels and seek private investors.
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The opening of applications turns this political will into an accessible procedure. According to Jornal de Negócios, European status would give the project the opportunity to compete for EU funding reserved for priority energy infrastructure.
A cable once estimated at up to 800 million euros
The initial project provided for an approximately 250-kilometre submarine link capable of transmitting up to 1,000 megawatts in both directions. Earlier estimates put its cost between 600 and 800 million euros, but the Portuguese government now considers these figures outdated due to changes in the price of equipment and technology.
The Portuguese grid operator REN and the National Office of Electricity and Drinking Water had already been tasked with studying the construction and financing of this interconnection. The cable would allow Morocco to export more renewable electricity to Europe, but also to import it when the needs of the national grid require it.
For Portugal, the interest is also strategic. Its electricity grid remains directly dependent on its connections with Spain. The Moroccan cable would provide it with an additional supply route, an argument that has become more important since the massive outage that affected the Iberian Peninsula in April 2025.
Morocco is simultaneously seeking to multiply its access to the European electricity market. It is already connected to Spain by two cables and is studying a direct connection with France without passing through the Spanish grid. Another much larger project with Germany remains confronted with the conditions set by Rabat regarding its financing and bidirectional operation.
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Inclusion on the European list is not automatic, however. The project will have to be presented and then assessed by the Commission and the relevant regional stakeholders. Only after obtaining project of mutual interest status will it be able to genuinely compete for European aid.
Nevertheless, Morocco and Portugal now have, for the first time since the file was revived, a European channel directly corresponding to their project. The search for the hundreds of millions of euros needed to build the cable can now officially begin in Brussels.