IN Brief:
- The Council of the EU has agreed its negotiating position on the European grids package.
- The package covers TEN-E reform, permitting, network planning, congestion income, interconnection, and resilience measures.
- The proposals would strengthen Europe’s grid investment framework as electrification increases pressure on transmission and distribution infrastructure.
The Council of the European Union has agreed its negotiating position on the European grids package, moving proposed reforms on electricity infrastructure, permitting, network planning, and resilience toward negotiations with the European Parliament.
The package combines a revision of the trans-European energy infrastructure regulation with a permitting directive intended to accelerate infrastructure delivery. Its scope reaches across electricity, hydrogen, and gas networks, although the most immediate pressure sits with the power system as electrification, renewable generation, and cross-border flows increase.
Under the Council position, a common planning framework would be used to identify infrastructure gaps and long-term system needs. The European Commission would develop a central scenario using input from member states and stakeholders, creating a more coordinated basis for network development across national borders.
Ministers also backed the use of a share of unspent congestion income for cross-border electricity projects. The allocation would begin at 10% from 1 January 2028 and rise by 5 percentage points each year until reaching 25% in 2031. The mechanism is intended to direct part of the value created by constrained networks back into infrastructure that can reduce those constraints.
The Council position adds a new category of priority projects covering critical components for emergency repairs to existing electricity interconnectors. That reflects the growing importance of resilience in energy infrastructure, where physical disruption, cyber risk, extreme weather, supply-chain pressure, and geopolitical exposure now sit alongside the traditional planning and market-design questions.
Permitting is also brought further into the reform package. The directive would support digital portals, clearer process management, and stronger treatment of electricity and renewable energy infrastructure as projects of overriding public interest unless proven otherwise. Member states would also be able to treat a lack of response from authorities during intermediary permitting stages as tacit approval.
Europe’s grid development problem is increasingly physical rather than conceptual. Renewable generation can often be financed and constructed faster than transmission corridors, interconnectors, substations, converter stations, and distribution reinforcement. As a result, electricity systems are carrying more renewable capacity while still relying on network infrastructure planned around older generation patterns and slower demand growth.
Large projects already moving through the UK and European pipeline show how much of the energy transition now depends on high-voltage delivery. A proposed 2GW HVDC route between Scotland and Wales would add controllable transfer capacity between renewable generation and demand centres. The LionLink hybrid offshore interconnector model points to a more complex North Sea grid architecture, while the Elmed converter-station award has pushed Europe-North Africa interconnection further into delivery.
Those projects show a wider shift in network planning. Grids are no longer only national backbones built around domestic generation fleets. They are becoming continental balancing assets, linking offshore wind, solar, storage, hydrogen production, industrial load, and interconnectors through increasingly complex operating arrangements.
The congestion-income proposal places a financial mechanism behind that shift. Congestion identifies where the power system is short of transfer capacity, and the associated revenues can otherwise remain detached from the physical bottlenecks that create them. The Council approach would put part of that income back into the infrastructure needed to relieve pressure across borders.
Permitting remains a hard constraint. Transmission lines, underground cables, offshore links, substations, converter stations, and reinforcement works face environmental assessment, land access, local consent, planning scrutiny, and supply-chain constraints. The Council position does not remove those tests, but it seeks to reduce procedural drag and improve consistency across member states.
Resilience provisions also point to a more security-conscious network model. Interconnectors and major power corridors now carry economic and strategic importance that extends well beyond energy trading. Emergency repair capability, spare components, and coordinated response planning are becoming central to electricity security as Europe leans more heavily on cross-border balancing.
The next stage will depend on negotiations with the European Parliament, with the Danish presidency aiming for agreement by the end of 2026. If adopted, the grids package would not build new infrastructure by itself, but it would give regulators, system operators, developers, and contractors a more coordinated policy framework for the build-out now required.
Europe’s electricity system is being asked to carry more generation, more load, more flexibility, and more security responsibility at the same time. The grids package places that physical reality closer to the centre of EU energy policy.
