In a letter to Vice-President Timmermans and Energy Commissioner Simson, T&D Europe has called on the European Commission and Governments to take decisive measures to step up and accelerate the much needed investments in electricity networks. The technology for future-proofing the network is already available. It just needs to be deployed at a much wider scale than it is today.
In view of the urgency of the situation T&D Europe has identified 4 measures that can swiftly contribute to the future-proofing of the grid:
- Include the manufacturing of equipment and systems for the management of electricity in the EU Taxonomy draft Delegated Regulation on climate change mitigation to enable infrastructure investments to modernize and future-proof Europe’s electricity transmission and distribution network where physically required
- Prioritise projects on the basis of their contribution to increasing the hosting capacity for renewable energy generation and efficient electric loads and improving the smartness of the network. System Operators need regulatory certainty that they can recover investments via network tariff and that their remuneration will remain predictable and at a market-based level.
- For this, immediately transition from the current regulatory CAPEX bias to a TOTEX approach, which supports the digitalization of the network enabling the fast integration of decentralized energy resources and new loads into the existing infrastructure
- Ensure the timely implementation of existing EU legislation around National Recovery and Resilience Plans as well as the implementation of measurement points in the networks to support the decision-making processes.
T&D Europe fully supports the mission to reduce Europe’s energy dependencies while at the same time building a more robust economic base. As the providers of technology for Europe’s electricity networks they will be able to make concrete contributions in short-, medium-, and long-term. Transmission and distribution infrastructure is vital for both direct electrification and indirect electrification with hydrogen electrolysis, a key enabler to reduce gas dependencies.
For the EU to be successful we will need to dramatically scale up and speed up investments, not just in renewable energy generation and electrification in heating and transport, but also in future-proofing the infrastructure that connects both: Europe’s transmission and distribution networks.
Download the full letter below.
Download