A draft impact assessment circulating inside the Commission this week says something the wind and solar industry has argued for three years. The renewable energy rulebook that carried the Union to 2030 will not carry it to 2040, and the reason has less to do with ambition than with copper, steel and queueing. Grid connections now sit at the centre of the next legislative cycle, and the document reframes the whole file around them.
The arithmetic explains the shift. Connection queues exist in at least sixteen member states, and roughly 120 gigawatts of mature renewable projects, including around 1.5 million household installations, risk missing timely access to the network before 2030. Austria, Bulgaria, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovakia carry the worst backlogs. Developers hold permits, financing and turbines. What they lack is a date on which an operator will plug them in.
That inverts the logic of the existing directive. The 2023 revision assumed the binding constraint was permitting, so it imposed deadlines on planning authorities and created acceleration areas. Those measures worked well enough that the bottleneck simply moved one step downstream. A project that clears planning in twelve months and then waits seven years for a connection has not been accelerated. It has been queued more efficiently.
The Commission’s own European Grids Package already set out the investment side of the answer, pointing to roughly 1.2 trillion euros of network spending needed by 2040 alongside more than 500 gigawatts of new generation. Its accompanying guidance pushes operators towards a first-ready, first-served allocation model, with maturity tests, milestones and regular purges of speculative applications from the queue. None of that is binding. Turning guidance into obligation is precisely what the post-2030 proposal, due before the end of the year, will have to decide.
Three arguments will dominate the negotiation. The first concerns who pays. Anticipatory investment means building lines before the demand they serve exists, which regulators dislike because consumers fund assets that may sit idle. National regulators have spent a decade rewarding caution, and the directive cannot simply order them to stop. The second concerns storage and flexibility, which reduce the amount of network needed per gigawatt installed but currently earn revenue through markets designed for dispatchable plants. The third concerns targets themselves. A single headline renewables percentage says nothing about whether the electrons reach a consumer, and several capitals now argue for metrics built around delivered capacity rather than installed capacity.
The 2040 climate framework, which lawmakers agreed last November and which commits the Union to cutting net emissions by 90 percent against 1990, gives the exercise its deadline. Analysts at Ember have argued that grid capacity, not generation, will determine whether that figure is reachable, and the Commission draft now broadly accepts the point.
Industry will welcome the diagnosis and fight the remedy. Network operators want cost recovery guarantees before they commit to anticipatory builds. Developers want queue discipline that removes rivals rather than themselves. Energy-intensive manufacturers want cheaper power and will resist tariff increases that fund the network. Each position is coherent, and the directive must reconcile all three.
What has changed is the framing. For a decade the renewables debate measured success in gigawatts announced. The next one will measure it in gigawatts connected, and that is a far harder number to inflate.
