The next chapter for Europe’s electricity grids: What the Council’s general approach gets right—and what it still needs
A decisive moment for Europe’s electricity grids
To deliver affordable, reliable, and clean electricity, enable electrification and reduce imported fuel dependency, Europe will need to strategically expand its transmission grids. This is the objective of the European Commission´s Grid Package, presented in December 2025, which consist of a proposal to revise the TEN-E Regulation and a proposal to accelerate permit granting procedures. Together, these files will help determine how Europe plans, selects and delivers the cross-border infrastructure needed for a more resilient, integrated and decarbonised energy system.
With the Council having adopted its general approach on 26 June, the package has entered a decisive phase of the legislative process. The European Parliament´s forthcoming position will complete the institutional picture ahead of trilogue negotiations, where the final legislative framework will be agreed between the institutions.
Clean Air Task Force (CATF) welcomes the Council’s general approach as a constructive step towards addressing some of the most pressing barriers to grid delivery. CATF has followed the topic throughout the process, drawing on its analytical expertise in electricity systems and energy modelling to identify where the proposal could better support a resilient and future-proof European energy system.
The upcoming trilogue negotiations will have important opportunities to enhance the TEN-E regulation.
Keeping EU grid planning independent and European
It’s essential to ensure that the Commission’s original vision for a central scenario – a new EU-wide reference scenario to guide infrastructure planning which is modelled not only by TSOs but lead by the Commission – remains a genuinely independent and unbiased basis for infrastructure planning and investment decisions. By shifting from a delegated act, as originally proposed by the Commission, to an implementing act, the Council’s position, if adopted in negotiations, would effectively re-nationalised key elements of the central scenario, granting Member States a qualified majority veto over its content.
This would significantly alter the institutional balance originally envisaged and increase the degree of national control over what is meant to be a shared, EU-wide reference framework, which makes transparency key for constructive decision making.
To ensure the “central scenario” is a robust, granular, forward-looking, and constantly improving assessment that covers regional and hourly peak demand profiles, emerging grid technology impacts, and integration effects on system needs, the underlying assumptions and inputs must be relevant and high quality. An absence of latest national and market data would result in potentially outdated assumptions, undermining the accuracy and credibility of EU-level infrastructure planning.As such, CATF supports the addition by the Council to require mandatory sensitivity analyses.
Conducting sensitivity analyses and scenario adjustments every two years would make planning more resilient. The schedule would also align with the bi-annual-rhythm of the European priority project selection. Expanding these reviews to consider alternative supply mixes, demand patterns, and existing trends and projections, allows to stress-test the system against a variety of potential future outcomes.
For the central scenario to capture cross-sectoral interdependencies between gas, hydrogen and electricity, strong consistency checks across all individual methodologies are needed. Otherwise, Europe risks parallel planning processes using assumptions that do not fully match. This is especially important as electricity, hydrogen, gas and industrial decarbonisation pathways become increasingly interconnected. The Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators should therefore have a clear role in independently reviewing these consistency checks and the assumptions behind them.
The Council position stresses that the central scenario and sensitivity analysis should also take account of national and regional contexts, including the latest National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs), which set out each Member State’s climate and energy objectives over ten-year periods. Reliance on NECPs as an input should be approached with caution, as these plans quickly become outdated, rely on heterogeneous data inputs, and are not yet aligned with the planning cycles used for infrastructure development.
Better data will be critical for assessing future grid needs, especially as electrification accelerates across transport, industry, buildings and other sectors. It can also help reduce duplication and administrative burden by better coordinating the data used across EU energy planning processes. The revision of the TEN-E Regulation is an opportunity to improve consistency across Europe’s energy planning frameworks.
CATF welcomes the Council’s position that the EU’s assumptions used for long-term network planning should be consistent with the assumptions used in the European Resource Adequacy Assessment, which examines whether the electricity system will have enough capacity to meet demand. Both should be based on identical top-down and bottom-up inputs and should also be aligned with planning for gas and hydrogen infrastructure.
Making transparency central to infrastructure planning
One major gap stands out in the Council´s general approach: transparency. Robust planning has to be transparent. The scenarios that guide billions of euros in infrastructure investment should be open to scrutiny by independent researchers, industry, civil society and other stakeholders.
That means going beyond the publication of selected input and output data. It should include full documentation of assumptions, methodology and modelling tools, and a process that enables external stakeholders to provide feedback at different stages to help ameliorate the quality of the planning.
This would be a clear improvement in current practice, where parts of the modelling landscape remain difficult for external stakeholders to assess or challenge. Open and transparent modelling would strengthen public confidence, improve technical credibility and support better investment decisions. Transparency is more than a procedural detail. It is essential to ensuring that Europe’s infrastructure choices are evidence-based, future-proof and trusted by investors and communities.
Accelerating permitting without weakening ambition
The permitting side of the Grid package is equally important. Slow and fragmented permitting, driven by lack of process and data clarity, community opposition to projects, and insufficient capacity, remains some of the biggest bottlenecks for delivering clean energy infrastructure.
But faster permitting can go hand in hand with environmental and social safeguards. Well-considered and careful clarifications on overriding public interest, environmental assessments and mitigation measures must be matched by a framework, processes, administrative capacity, and coordination that are genuinely capable of accelerating delivery.
The Council’s general approach usefully reiterates key barriers to speeding permitting timelines, suggests to maintain renewable acceleration zones and streamline standalone storage permitting, and promote co-location of clean generating resources with storage and grid assets, among other provisions.
The position also recognises the community engagement and public support needed to deploy infrastructure. For example, it would provide an independent facilitator to promote mutually beneficial developer-community dialogue. It also encourages Member States to adopt benefits-sharing measures for at least large renewable energy projects, while allowing flexibility to investigate and apply benefit-sharing measures that meet the needs of their individual communities.
Although timelines for certain permitting steps have been extended, clear and consistent deadlines remain important to set shared expectations for all parties. Encouraging Member States to designate a single point of contact for key infrastructure projects, including renewable generation projects, could also streamline procedures for project sponsors and improve efficiency. However, negotiators should be careful not to weaken the ambition of the permitting framework and should provide as much opportunity for collaboration, coordination, and transparency as possible.
For example, digitalising permitting and review processes is critical to improved data transparency, faster document submission and review, logging and understanding of public support and concerns around infrastructure projects, and better information sharing and communication between authorities in Member States and between Member States and the European Union.
However, under the Council’s position, digital, interoperable portals for permit-granting procedures would become optional, introducing at the outset a lack of process clarity for developers and stakeholders working across Member States. Tacit approval mechanisms for projects would become voluntary, similarly setting the stage for patchwork of policies across the European Union.
The Council notes the need for Member States to resource increased permitting workloads and new digital processes, but could do more to provide guidance or financial and technical support. As Europe aims to strengthen its regional infrastructure, these positions risk slowing the significant cross-border deployment Europe urgently needs.
Securing a stronger final Grid Package
As the European Parliament continues its work and with interinstitutional negotiations then set to commence under the Irish Presidency, the priority should be clear. Negotiators should preserve an EU-wide central planning framework and enable the rigorous prioritisation of projects across Member States based on their European system-wide values assessed against transparent and harmonised criteria.
These include their contribution to security of supply, decarbonisation, market integration, and overall cost efficiency. To achieve this, the framework needs to further strengthen data input quality and transparency through open modelling, ensuring independent review of cross-sector assumptions, and keeping the permitting framework ambitious and time-bound. Strong Parliamentary backing of these points is crucial for ensuring that the final version of the Grid package does not fall short.
Europe’s energy security, industrial competitiveness and climate goals all depend on infrastructure that can keep pace with the transition. Grid planning must therefore be forward-looking, transparent and grounded in credible evidence. The Grids Package is a timely opportunity to build that foundation.
