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The Bay of Biscay interconnection is built and operated by Inelfe, the 50/50 joint venture between France's RTE and Spain's Red Eléctrica that also delivered the earlier Baixas-Santa Llogaia link. The EIB loan funds construction of a 400 km high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) link — around 300 km of it submarine — running from Cubnezais in France to Gatika in Spain, using DC submarine cable with AC conversion stations at each end. The first EUR 1.2 billion of the EUR 1.6 billion EIB facility was signed on 16 June 2025 at EIB headquarters in Luxembourg, split between RTE and Red Eléctrica; the project also carries a separate EUR 578 million grant from the EU's Connecting Europe Facility. Global Trade Alert logs the transaction as a "red"-flagged state loan.
Officials framed the project around reducing the Iberian Peninsula's electrical isolation from the continental European grid, meeting the EU's 15% interconnection target for 2030, and enabling higher cross- border flows of renewable power — the link raises exchange capacity from 2,800 MW to 5,000 MW. Severity is set at 3/5, reflecting the EUR 1.6 billion quantum (comparable in scale to other EIB/national-promotional- bank infrastructure loans rated 3, e.g. the CAD 1 billion BC Ferries loan), tempered by the fact that this is development-bank credit to state-owned/regulated TSOs for cross-border grid integration rather than a sector-targeted industrial subsidy or trade-control measure.
lending alongside its Pan-EU Security & Defence Lending Envelope tranches and national-promotional-bank co-financing deals — part of the broader Western industrial-policy stack of development-bank capital deployment.
date, a prerequisite for further Iberian renewable-export capacity and for the EU's broader push to de-isolate the Iberian electricity market.
and Red Eléctrica, or of how the remaining EUR 0.4 billion of the EUR 1.6 billion facility will be tranched.
required is not addressed in the primary source.