Last week, industry leaders, European politicians and experts gathered in Brussels at the Eurelectric’s Grids for Speed event to discuss the future of Europe’s electricity grid.
Europe’s power infrastructure must keep pace with the urgency and scale of the energy transition. Yet, much of our grid was constructed in the 1980s, designed for a system where large, centralised power plants sent one-way flows of electricity to consumers. Back then, renewable energy was nearly absent.
Today, this landscape has changed dramatically. Solar panels, wind turbines, and hydropower installations now span Europe’s rural and urban areas. Heating is increasingly electrified, and Europe’s electricity generation is greener than ever. In fact, recent data from Eurelectric shows that in the first half of the year, renewables accounted for over 50% of Europe’s electricity generation.
Consumers, too, are now more active participants in the energy transition. Households and businesses can add flexibility to the grid by adjusting their electricity use to times of lower demand and more favourable prices, thanks to smart meters. Active consumers can also engage with the grid, even selling electricity back during peak times.
The panel discussions that were held at the event came with five key recommendations for improving Europe’s grids:
- Improving regulations
- Facilitating permitting
- Developing sector-specific skills for workers
- Unleash system flexibility and
- Streamline collaboration
Regulation: a call for adaptive and supportive Frameworks
One of the main calls during Grids for Speed was for better regulatory frameworks that can adapt to the currently evolving energy infrastructure landscape. Maarten Otto, CEO of Alliander, emphasised the importance of having a regulatory framework “that is adaptive to different local situations and that helps facilitate the energy transition.”
Similarly, Remy Garaude-Verdier – European Affairs Director at ENEDIS – highlighted the challenges posed by overregulation, urging for a balanced approach.
“Please don’t overregulate us! We are professionals, we know when to invest, when to leverage, how to do our job. Give us the freedom to innovate and to come up with new solutions,” he remarked.
Permitting: overcoming bureaucratic hurdles
The panellists also brought to light the significant and detrimental delays being caused by current permitting processes across the EU. For instance, José Manuel Revuelta – Head of ENEL Grids Iberia – pointed out that in Spain, building out a new line takes about seven years because of permitting delays, meaning that any investments being made for 2030 is already too late.
Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, echoed this sentiment, stressing the competitive disadvantage Europe faces due to lengthy permitting processes.
“The opportunity cost of [lengthy permitting] is making things worse; we need to speed up our processes,”
– he said, drawing a comparison with China, where he claimed that it is nearly three times cheaper to build offshore wind due to the Chinese having a more streamlined permitting in comparison to the EU.
Skills: bridging the talent gap
As the energy sector and its infrastructure undergoes rapid transformation, the need for workers with the right skills to keep up is becoming increasingly critical. Remy Garaude-Verdier noted the alarming shortage of talent in the industry, claiming that nearly a third of the French electricity industry is struggling to hire new talent. He underscored the importance of having educational programs designed for the grid industry, as there are none in France at the moment. For this reason, ENEDIS has been collaborating with schools to create specific programs. A practice that should be streamlined across the EU.
Global Digital Grid Leader at EY Paul Micallef, one of the collaborators on the landmark Grids for Speed Study, emphasised the scale of the challenge, highlighting that the grid sector is going to create an additional 2 million jobs – a staggering statistic when compared to the 800,000 currently employed.
System Flexibility: adapting to dynamic demand
The need for a flexible grid that can better handle load fluctuations coming from variable wind, solar and distributed assets was another frequently recurring recommendation. Maarten Otto explained the grid congestion issues faced by the Netherlands, noting that increasing flexibility can be a solution as it would help manage the volatility of power supply and flatten the peaks in demand.
The same challenge can be seen in other European countries. Lithuania alone registered a 1425% increase in grid connection requests in 2022 compared to the previous year, as shown in Eurelectric’s Power Barometer 2024.
Leonhard Birnbaum, Chairman of the Board and CEO of E.ON, also spoke on needing flexibility, while also highlighting the importance of digitalisation and monitoring for future grids, stating that:
“the future of the grid will be dominated by real-time monitoring, and will be very digitalised.”
Leonhard Birnbaum – President at Eurelectric and CEO at E.ON
Digitalisation is the only way forward according to Birnbaum, who emphasised that E.ON has to make a grid connection every seven seconds of a working day in Germany from now to 2030 to keep up with demand – a task that would be physically impossible without an automated system.
Collaboration: Finding a unified approach
Last but not least, a call for greater collaboration emerged as one of the cornerstones for the future success of Europe’s grids. Panellist Peter Holicza from the Hungarian Ministry of Energy emphasised the importance of such collaboration, noting that
“collaboration [on grids] is a top priority for the current Hungarian Presidency Council”.
He shared examples of recent initiatives, including an informal ministerial meeting in Budapest and discussions on market coupling involving the Western Balkan states.
José Manuel Revuelta also reinforced the need for collaboration, stating,
“we need to collaborate with local communities, and this needs to be all along the value chain. Closer collaboration with the investment community is also going to be needed”.
Eurelectric’s event made one thing clear: modernising Europe’s grid won’t be an easy task but the roadmap for overcoming current challenges and achieving a resilient, future-ready grid is there. As the energy transition accelerates, the implementation of these five recommendations will be critical to get Europe’s electricity infrastructure up to speed with the demands of our future economy.
