“There’s no need to worry about our country’s energy security,” said Belgium’s energy minister Mathieu Bihet.
Even as Belgium — separated from Russia by several other countries — faces repeated drone incursions into its airspace, with origins still officially unidentified but suspected to come from Russia, the minister sought to reassure the public about the risk of a possible blackout.
“First of all, I can hardly picture Russian tanks on Brussels’ Grand Place,” he told Brussels Signal today.
“Secondly, we have more than a dozen interconnections with neighbouring countries — unlike Spain, for instance.”
In April, Spain suffered an exceptionally large-scale blackout. According to a report released by the Spanish Government, the huge outage stemmed from multiple causes — above all, shortcomings in the national transmission network.
Spanish officials said it was the result of an over-voltage, resulting from several failures identified in the management of the transmission grid, operated by Red Eléctrica de España.
The Spanish Government placed responsibility squarely on the company.
Bihet, a Francophone Liberal and member of Belgium’s federal government formed in February, said energy security is not affected by the growing tensions in Brussels over whether to respond militarily to the drone incidents.
Despite the geopolitical uncertainty, Belgium’s central position in Europe gives it an advantage and shields it from blackout risks — even in an emergency, military or otherwise, he said.
“Spain didn’t have all these interconnections,” Bihet pointed out. “A blackout like theirs can’t happen here, because we wouldn’t lose our connections with Germany, France and the others all at once.”
Belgium’s power grid is linked by interconnections with the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany, among others. A high-voltage line with Denmark is also planned, while Ireland and Norway are set to join this list.
“Today it’s true — energy and electricity have become points of tension,” Bihet added.
“Russia keeps targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure as winter approaches, so it’s one of the key battlefields in this war.”
Those attacks on Ukraine’s grid have been ongoing for three years. The Russian army tends to intensify them sharply at the start of winter, when energy demand peaks.
“We’re never prepared for everything,” Bihet conceded. “But our system is interconnected, and we maintain good co-ordination with European photovoltaic networks — so we’ll be fine.”
In January, Elia, Belgium’s electricity transmission operator, published in its 2024 Electricity Mix report that international exchanges hit a record high.
That came with a significant rise in solar production, and low gas usage. International electricity exchanges reached an all-time high of 44.5 TWh, with net imports from France totalling 12.6 TWh.
The return of nuclear power in Belgium plays an important part in Bihat’s confidence. Under the previous plan to phase it out, the country was short 1.2 gigawatts of capacity — a gap that, according to the minister, the new energy mix now fills.
“They wanted us to believe we wouldn’t need nuclear,” he said. “That two gas plants would be enough — but that was false.”
In May, the adoption of a law formalising the return of nuclear energy, the federal parliament turned the page on two decades of anti-nuclear sentiment.
The bill — originally co-sponsored by Bihet before he became minister — abolishes the previous timeline for the nuclear phase-out and removes the ban on building new production capacity.
It also eliminates all references to a 2025 nuclear exit and repeals the prohibition, in place since 2003, that prevented Belgium from constructing new nuclear power facilities.
