Aalborg: Danish installers who fit heat pumps for a living have watched the same arithmetic defeat them for years. The machine works. The physics works. Then the customer looks at the electricity bill, compares it with a gas bill, and keeps the boiler. The Commission’s Electrification Action Plan, presented on 17 July 2026, finally names that gap as the policy problem rather than a consumer preference.
The plan sets out to close the price spread between a kilowatt-hour of electricity and an equivalent unit of fossil energy. That spread is not an accident of markets. Member states have loaded electricity bills with levies, network charges and legacy renewable support costs that gas bills largely escape. Households therefore pay a penalty for choosing the cleaner option, and the electrification plan concedes the point openly.
Alongside it, the Commission tabled a proposal on electricity bills, COM(2026) 600, that hands governments explicit permission to cut network charges for defined consumer groups and to lower taxes for energy-intensive industry. The instrument matters more than the rhetoric. Capitals have long argued that state aid and taxation rules constrained what they could shave off a bill. The proposal removes that excuse and shifts responsibility squarely onto finance ministries.
Aalborg sits inside a district heating system that already runs on electricity for part of the year, which makes the Danish case unusually favourable. Most of the bloc looks nothing like it. In several member states, network tariffs recover the full cost of the distribution grid from a shrinking base of captive residential customers, so every household that electrifies raises the per-unit charge for everyone left behind. Regulators call this the death spiral, and the electrification plan does not resolve it. It asks governments to socialise more of the grid cost through general taxation instead.
The second half of the package revises the Emissions Trading System. A stronger carbon price raises the cost of the fossil alternative rather than lowering the cost of the clean one, and it does so predictably. Industry associations broadly prefer that route because it does not depend on twenty-seven separate budget decisions. Consumer groups distrust it because the burden lands first on households that cannot afford a heat pump at any price.
Both criticisms hold. A carbon price that bites without a matching cut in network charges simply makes energy dearer. A cut in network charges without a carbon price leaves the fossil option cheap. The Commission has bundled the two precisely because neither works alone, and that bundling is now the vulnerable part of the file. Council working parties can adopt the popular half and stall the unpopular one.
Watch the autumn Energy Council for the first sign of which half survives intact. The Council has already backed the earlier grids package, which suggests appetite for infrastructure spending but not necessarily for tax reform. Installers in Aalborg will judge the plan by one number only, and it will appear on a customer’s bill rather than in a communication.
