IN Brief:
- ENTSO-E and ENTSOG have released draft joint scenarios for the 2026 Ten-Year Network Development Plans.
- The scenarios point to strong electrification, rising electricity demand, hydrogen growth, and declining methane demand.
- The package will support future electricity, gas, and hydrogen infrastructure planning across Europe.
ENTSO-E and ENTSOG have released their draft joint scenarios for the 2026 Ten-Year Network Development Plans, setting out a cross-sector planning framework for electricity, hydrogen, and gas infrastructure through 2050.
Designed to support the next electricity and gas TYNDPs, the draft scenarios provide a common quantitative basis for European infrastructure assessment. They are planning scenarios rather than single forecasts, testing how the energy system may develop under different policy, technology, and economic conditions.
The central policy-based scenario, National Trends+, reflects updated national energy and climate policies and is aligned with EU climate targets, including at least a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050. The package also includes economic variants to test infrastructure requirements under different macroeconomic conditions.
Across the scenarios, overall final energy demand declines through efficiency gains while electricity and hydrogen demand rise. Methane demand falls progressively and becomes more decarbonised, while hydrogen takes a larger role in industrial energy use, system flexibility, and cross-sector integration.
Electricity networks will need to support demand growth from transport, heating, industry, data centres, electrolysers, and digital infrastructure. At the same time, generation will become more weather-dependent as wind and solar capacity expands, creating a system that must handle higher electricity volumes, more variable supply, and a more active demand side.
The draft scenarios are the first full implementation of ACER’s TYNDP Scenarios Framework Guidelines from the beginning of the process. That gives regulators, operators, investors, and policymakers a more consistent basis for assessing long-life infrastructure including transmission lines, interconnectors, storage assets, hydrogen corridors, and residual gas networks.
The scenarios will feed into the TYNDP 2026 cycle, including the 8th PCI and PMI selection process. Projects of Common Interest and Projects of Mutual Interest remain important routes for cross-border infrastructure support, particularly where network reinforcement, interconnection, offshore systems, storage, or hydrogen infrastructure delivers benefits across national boundaries.
The modelling framework lands in a European grid environment already under pressure from renewable connection volumes, rising electrification, and regional reinforcement needs. Mediterranean grid investment, offshore wind corridors, hydrogen planning, and interconnector development are now increasingly linked rather than treated as separate infrastructure questions.
Electricity flexibility sits at the centre of that transition. Batteries, demand response, electrolysers, pumped storage, interconnectors, and dispatchable low-carbon generation will all be needed across different timeframes. Short-duration batteries can support balancing and congestion management, while electrolysers can provide flexible demand during periods of high renewable output.
Digitalisation will also shape how far existing networks can be used before reinforcement becomes unavoidable. Higher utilisation depends on better forecasting, operational visibility, asset monitoring, and coordination between transmission and distribution systems. Distributed generation, EV charging, heat pumps, local storage, and industrial flexibility make the edge of the grid more active than earlier planning models assumed.
The decline of methane demand does not remove the need for integrated planning. Existing gas infrastructure may still support system flexibility, renewable and low-carbon gases, and hydrogen development in specific industrial sectors. The planning challenge is to avoid overbuilding assets that lose utilisation while maintaining resilience and security of supply during the transition.
Europe’s infrastructure planning is entering a more interdependent phase. Renewable generation, transmission, storage, hydrogen, flexible demand, and residual gas infrastructure must be assessed as parts of the same system, because underbuilding in one area can increase costs or operational stress elsewhere. The TYNDP 2026 scenarios provide the next modelling foundation for those investment choices.
