Portugal has at times in the past sent electricity that it doesn’t use during the night to Spain, said Jaime Silva, the chief technology officer at Fusion Fuel, a Portuguese company that in August received a $10 million grant from the government to develop a green hydrogen project in Sines. The company’s offices occupy the site of a shuttered Siemens transformer factory. A model hydrogen generator powered by the sun sits on the lawn out front.
He said it would be relatively easy and quick to install electrical cables through France that could transfer that energy farther north.
“Before this crisis,” Mr. Silva said, “it was just Portugal and Spain saying, ‘We want to sell that energy,’ but the response from France was, ‘No, no, no.’”
“Now,” he said, “we have Portugal and Spain saying, ‘We want to sell,’ and the other countries are saying, ‘We need to buy.’”
“If France doesn’t want to buy it,” Mr. Silva added, “at least allow us to sell it to Germany, to Hungary, to the Czech Republic, to Austria, to Luxembourg, to Belgium, because those countries need energy right now.”
Portugal and Spain’s ability to generate cheap electricity from wind, sun and water is putting pressure on Europe’s energy markets in other ways. They have argued that the European Union needs to reconfigure a system that currently bases the price of electricity on the price of gas. The power market was designed to encourage the development of renewable energy at a time when gas was cheap. But skyrocketing gas prices have caused electricity prices to explode.
After pressure from Portugal and Spain, the European Union agreed in June to what is being called the “Iberian exception”: The two countries can cap the price of electricity, and decouple it from the price of gas, for one year.
The arrangement was condemned by critics who said it interfered with the market, but other leaders have since joined the push for revamping the price structure.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on Monday that the current system didn’t work. “We have to reform it,” she said. “We have to adapt it to the new realities of the domain of renewables.”
“It was developed under completely different circumstances and for completely different purposes,” she added.
Michael E. Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin, said the transition period was the most difficult. “There will be a lot of flailing around to find a solution for a very complex problem,” he said, adding, “Solutions take two to five years, and the crisis is now.”
Meanwhile, he said, Europe is “muddling along as best it can.”