Duarte Cordeiro said that the government is accelerating the licensing process for the production of solar energy and the renovation of wind turbines with greater productivity, supporting the production of energy from hydrogen and relying on offshore wind production to reach 80 percent renewables by 2026.

“Portugal has already achieved an autonomy of 70 percent, but we know that this occurs mainly in autumn and winter, when there is wind and the dams are full, however wind from the sea can guarantee production throughout the year”, he explained.

Duarte Cordeiro was speaking at the inauguration of the photovoltaic plant of the ceramics company Revigrés, which now supplies around 20 percent of the energy consumed by the industry in its production process, in an investment of more than 14 million euros, supported by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) and 50 percent financed by equity, as stressed by Paula Roque, from the company's management.

"Revigrés is an example at all levels and it was even before the PRR, because it had a great capacity to reuse resources in its production process", praised the minister.


Dampening effects


Duarte Cordeiro took advantage of his visit to Revigrés to recall that the consequences of the war in Ukraine were felt in the rise in energy prices, which the Government sought to dampen.

“We have had a set of mechanisms to reduce prices, such as the famous Iberian mechanism, the investment we made of €4.5 billion to reduce tariffs for accessing networks, which have allowed lower prices for last nine years and which also allowed the price of electricity in the regulated market to fall by 3 percent in April, and also the mechanism that we adopted for companies that consume more than 10 thousand cubic meters of gas, which has allowed us, since the beginning of year, to reduce the price of gas by around 26 percent”, he exemplified.

“Today we have instruments that guarantee us that prices will not rise too much throughout the year and we are doing two things: accelerating the introduction of renewable energies that allow us to have guarantees of low prices in the future and, at the same time, applying a set of instruments that allow us to contain market prices, preventing families and companies from being affected”, he concluded.