On June 30, I had the opportunity to present at the European Parliament as part of the project Independent Voltage: European Grid Resilience, Energy Sovereignty and EU Compatibility Standards, led by the European Liberal Forum. My contribution examined Spain’s position within the European electricity system and, more specifically, the combination of infrastructure, regulatory compatibility, investment incentives, and market reform that will be necessary if Spain is to contribute more effectively to European energy security without sacrificing economic competitiveness.
Presenting this work at the European Parliament was personally meaningful, but the value of the experience went considerably beyond the presentation itself. Energy policy has become an unusually rich field for political economy because questions that once appeared primarily technical—generation capacity, transmission networks, storage, and cross-border connections—are now inseparable from questions of investment, geopolitics, industrial competitiveness, regulation, and institutional quality. Europe’s recent experience has also made clear that energy security cannot be reduced to the quantity of energy produced within national borders, since the structure of the network, the diversity of suppliers, the quality of cross-border infrastructure, and the institutional conditions governing investment are equally important.
One conversation during the event gave me an additional perspective that I had not developed sufficiently in my original research. Dr. Wolfgang Pape, a former European Commission official and former General Manager of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation, asked me about the possibility of strengthening the energy relationship between Spain and Morocco. His question was straightforward, but it led to a broader issue that I believe deserves further investigation: when discussing Spain’s integration into the European energy system, why do we normally look north toward France while paying considerably less attention to what lies immediately to the south?
The more I have examined this question, the more interesting it has become. Spain is conventionally described as being on the southwestern periphery of the European electricity system, partly because the Pyrenees continue to limit its physical integration with the rest of continental Europe. Yet this interpretation depends on where we draw the map. If Spain is considered within a broader Euro-Mediterranean energy system rather than exclusively within continental Europe, its geographical position begins to look quite different, since it could potentially connect the Iberian renewable market with continental Europe to the north while simultaneously developing stronger energy relationships with Morocco and, over a longer horizon, other North African economies.
Energy Security Does Not Require Energy Autarky
One of the questions that interested me during the Independent Voltage project concerned the meaning of energy sovereignty. The term is sometimes used in a way that suggests that greater security necessarily requires greater national self-sufficiency, but I am not convinced that this is the most useful economic interpretation, particularly for electricity markets in which demand and supply must be balanced continuously and renewable generation varies according to weather conditions.
A country with abundant solar generation during part of the day may benefit from exporting electricity rather than curtailing production, while the same country may need imports when domestic output declines or demand increases. Cross-border infrastructure can therefore perform an economic function similar to diversification elsewhere in the economy because it expands the number of available alternatives when conditions change. The relevant objective should not be to eliminate interdependence, but to prevent interdependence from becoming dangerously concentrated around one supplier, one technology, or one transmission corridor.
This distinction matters for Europe because the experience of excessive reliance on particular external energy suppliers has understandably strengthened the political demand for strategic autonomy. Yet replacing international exchange with national isolation would sacrifice many of the benefits generated by specialization, competition, and geographical diversification. A more resilient architecture would combine domestic generation with storage, flexible demand, cross-border infrastructure, and access to several competing sources of supply, making European energy sovereignty better understood as the capacity to adjust when circumstances change than as an attempt to achieve energy autarky.
Spain and Morocco: An Existing Connection, Not a Hypothetical One
Dr. Pape’s question is especially relevant because Spain and Morocco are already connected electrically. Red Eléctrica reports that the interconnection consists of two 400-kV lines crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, with the first commissioned in 1997 and the second in 2006. This existing infrastructure means that the discussion about deeper Euro-Mediterranean electricity integration does not begin with a hypothetical connection, but with a cross-border system that has operated for decades.
In February 2019, Spain and Morocco agreed to develop a third electricity interconnection. The proposed link was designed as another 400-kV connection with approximately 700 MW of technical capacity, while the projected investment was around €150 million. Red Eléctrica estimated that, after accounting for the support margin required by the system, the three links together could provide approximately 1,500 MW of commercial exchange capacity.
The original plan envisaged commissioning before 2026, an objective that has not been realized according to the timetable announced in 2019. This delay is itself interesting from a research perspective because cross-border infrastructure is not determined solely by engineering feasibility. Financing, regulation, permitting, political relations, expected electricity prices, and uncertainty about future policy can all influence whether an apparently desirable project is ultimately built, so the gap between announced infrastructure and realized investment can be as informative as the project itself.
The Spanish government’s 2019 account of the agreement emphasized that stronger interconnection could increase security of supply, support renewable-energy development, expand electricity exchanges, and encourage Morocco’s convergence with the rules of the European internal electricity market. These objectives suggest that the relationship should be studied not simply as a bilateral infrastructure project, but as part of a wider process of market and regulatory integration.
The existing links therefore change the nature of the research question. We do not need to ask whether an electricity relationship between Europe and North Africa is theoretically possible, because it already exists across the Strait of Gibraltar. The more useful questions concern its economically efficient scale, the value of additional capacity, the conditions under which electricity flows north or south, and whether stronger interconnection could improve renewable integration and system resilience without creating a new form of concentrated dependency.
A Mediterranean Dimension to European Energy Policy
The timing of this discussion is particularly interesting because European policy is moving toward a broader Mediterranean approach. On June 9, 2026, the European Union launched the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy and Clean Tech Cooperation initiative (T-MED), which is intended to accelerate renewable energy, hydrogen, clean-technology manufacturing, and modern electricity networks across the Mediterranean while supporting a more integrated and interconnected regional energy market. The initiative aims to mobilize up to €25 billion in expected investment by 2035, with more than €5 billion in guarantee capacity made available under the European Fund for Sustainable Development Plus.
The same European Commission announcement estimates that the Mediterranean region has around 2,300 GW of untapped renewable potential and states that solar and wind costs can be 30–40 percent lower than in Europe. These figures demonstrate why the region attracts strategic interest, although resource potential should not be confused with economically viable production. Solar irradiation and wind conditions may create comparative advantages, but energy becomes economically useful to distant consumers only when generation, transmission, financing, market access, and regulation can be combined at a competitive cost.
This is where Spain may have an unusually interesting position. From a continental perspective, the country sits beyond the Pyrenees; from a Mediterranean perspective, it lies only a short distance from North Africa while simultaneously possessing access to the EU single market and the wider Iberian electricity system. Spain could therefore be examined as an intermediary rather than simply as a peripheral market.
The same logic need not stop with Morocco. The Mediterranean already contains several actual or proposed energy corridors, and European policy increasingly considers connections involving North African economies as part of its future energy architecture. This does not imply that a unified Mediterranean electricity market is imminent, nor should political announcements be confused with economically viable projects, but it does suggest that the conventional division between a European energy system in the north and a largely separate North African system in the south may become less useful over time.
Spain as a Two-Directional Energy Hub
Thinking about Spain in these terms changes the analytical framework. Stronger interconnection with France remains essential because the economic value of Iberian renewable generation depends partly on the ability to move electricity toward consumers elsewhere in Europe when domestic production exceeds domestic demand. Improving northern connections, however, does not exclude developing southern ones.
A more interconnected Iberian system could operate in several directions. Portugal and Spain could continue deepening electricity-market integration within Iberia, stronger connections with France could improve access to continental European markets, and additional capacity across the Strait of Gibraltar could allow electricity to move between Iberia and Morocco according to changing production and demand conditions. Over a longer horizon, renewable hydrogen and other technologies may create additional forms of cross-Mediterranean energy exchange, although their commercial viability must ultimately be demonstrated rather than assumed.
Under this interpretation, Spain’s geography ceases to be simply a constraint. Its location could allow the country to function as a link among Iberian renewable resources, continental European demand, and North African generation. Whether this potential can actually be realized depends much less on geography itself than on the infrastructure and institutions that determine whether capital can be invested productively across borders.
The Institutional Side of the Energy Transition
This institutional dimension deserves more attention in energy-policy discussions. Building renewable generation, storage, electricity networks, and eventually hydrogen infrastructure requires large investments whose returns may depend on conditions many years into the future. Investors therefore have to evaluate not only expected energy prices and technological costs but also permitting procedures, access to transmission networks, regulatory changes, taxation, political risk, and the credibility of contracts.
Regulatory uncertainty is consequently an economic cost even when it does not appear directly on an engineering balance sheet. If investors believe that the rules governing a project may change substantially after capital has been committed, the expected return required to compensate for that risk increases. Some projects that appear technically attractive can then become commercially unattractive, while others may simply be postponed until the institutional environment becomes clearer.
Cross-border investment between EU and non-EU jurisdictions makes these questions even more complicated because different regulatory systems must interact. Technical standards, environmental requirements, electricity-market rules, investment protections, and transmission access all have to be sufficiently compatible for exchange to function efficiently. The 2019 Spain-Morocco agreement explicitly recognized this institutional problem by linking stronger interconnection to convergence with European electricity-market rules and the removal of barriers to electricity trade.
The abundance of renewable resources does not by itself generate investment; capital moves when entrepreneurs and investors believe that resources can be transformed into energy that can be produced, transmitted, and sold under sufficiently predictable conditions. The economic case for Mediterranean integration therefore cannot be reduced to the observation that North Africa has abundant sunshine and Europe needs clean energy, because resource endowments create opportunities only when infrastructure, market access, institutional credibility, and entrepreneurial judgment make those opportunities commercially realizable.
A Question for Future Research
My conversation with Dr. Pape has therefore left me with a question that I would like to explore more systematically: under what conditions could deeper energy integration between Spain and Morocco improve energy resilience, renewable integration, competition, and economic efficiency on both sides of the Mediterranean?
A serious answer would require considerably more than comparing installed renewable capacity. Hourly electricity flows between Spain and Morocco could be examined alongside wholesale prices, available transmission capacity, renewable-generation patterns, congestion, and weather conditions. This would make it possible to study whether Moroccan and Iberian renewable production are sufficiently complementary to provide diversification benefits and how those benefits change across seasons and hours of the day.
The proposed third interconnection offers another possible research design because Spain and Morocco already possess two links, allowing additional capacity to be modeled against an observable existing market relationship rather than an entirely hypothetical system. Scenarios could examine how greater transfer capacity affects electricity prices, renewable curtailment, congestion, storage requirements, and security of supply under different assumptions about generation on both sides of the Strait.
I am also interested in the relationship between storage and interconnection. Batteries, pumped hydro, demand response, and international transmission all provide flexibility, but they solve different problems and operate over different time horizons. It would therefore be useful to identify when storage substitutes for additional interconnection and when the two are complementary, particularly in an Iberian system with a growing share of variable renewable generation.
The political-economy question may ultimately be the most important. Interconnection creates resilience when it gives consumers and producers additional alternatives, but it can create vulnerability when supply becomes concentrated around infrastructure that has no realistic substitute. European energy policy should therefore pay attention not only to the quantity of cross-border capacity but also to the structure of the network, the number of competing suppliers and routes, and the institutional arrangements that determine access to them.
This discussion suggests a hypothesis that I would like to examine more systematically in future research. European energy resilience may depend less on maximizing national self-sufficiency than on the institutional and physical structure of cross-border networks. Interdependence is not necessarily a source of vulnerability when countries have access to competing suppliers, alternative transmission routes, sufficient storage, and markets capable of adjusting to changing conditions; the greater risk arises when interdependence becomes concentrated around a small number of suppliers or corridors, because disruption at a single point can then affect a much larger part of the system.
What I Took Home from Brussels
My participation in the Independent Voltage project was meaningful because the discussion did something that good academic exchange should do: it changed the questions I wanted to ask. I went to Brussels principally to discuss Spain’s integration into the European electricity system, the constraints created by insufficient cross-border capacity, and the institutional reforms required to attract investment while maintaining competitiveness. I returned to Madrid thinking much more seriously about Spain’s southern connections and the possibility that its future energy role might need to be understood within a Euro-Mediterranean framework.
The launch of T-MED shortly before the event makes this question particularly timely, but policy initiatives alone will not determine the outcome. Whether Mediterranean energy integration develops successfully will depend on relative costs, technological change, private investment, regulatory compatibility, political stability, and the ability of markets to discover which projects create sufficient value to justify the capital committed to them. The role of policy should therefore include establishing credible rules and facilitating infrastructure where genuine cross-border coordination problems exist, while leaving sufficient room for prices, investment decisions, and entrepreneurial discovery to reveal which technologies and routes are economically sustainable.
For Spain, this creates a research and policy agenda that extends beyond the traditional question of overcoming the Iberian Peninsula’s relative isolation from continental Europe. Stronger connections across the Pyrenees remain important, but Spain’s position also invites us to look across the Strait of Gibraltar. If the institutional conditions are appropriate, the country could gradually become a more important interface among Iberia, continental Europe, and North Africa rather than remaining principally an endpoint of the European electricity system.
I am grateful to the European Liberal Forum and the organizations involved in the Independent Voltage project for creating the opportunity for this discussion, to the Fundación para el Avance de la Libertad and especially its President, Roxana Nicula Tanase, for their support, and to Universidad Europea for making my participation and travel possible. I am also grateful to Dr. Wolfgang Pape for a conversation that encouraged me to look at the same map from a different direction. For a researcher, that is often one of the most useful things that can happen at a conference: we present the work we have already completed, but sometimes the most valuable result is discovering the next question worth studying.
Suggested References
European Commission. (2026). Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy and Clean Tech Cooperation initiative (T-MED).
Government of Spain. (2019). Spain and Morocco sign agreements on energy and electricity interconnection.
Red Eléctrica. (2019). Spain and Morocco agree on the development of a third interconnection between both countries.
Red Eléctrica. (2019). Spain–Morocco electricity interconnection information.
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How to Cite this Article (APA 7th edition)
Wang, H. H. (2026, July 18). From the European Parliament to the Mediterranean: Rethinking Spain’s Role in Europe’s Energy Architecture. https://williamhongsongwang.com/2026/07/18/from-the-european-parliament-to-the-mediterranean-rethinking-spains-role-in-europes-energy-architecture/
