Electricity trading can bring down the costs of the EU’s transition to a competitive low-carbon economy, in particular by facilitating the integration of renewable energy from variable sources. This CEPS Special Report finds, however, that insufficient grid infrastructure and regulatory obstacles prevent the trading potential from being fully realised in northern Europe. While acknowledging that many interconnector projects are under development, it identifies various barriers that are precluding the grid rollout from taking place on time. The European Commission’s energy infrastructure package is an important step forward to overcome these barriers, but the authors warn that the scale and urgency of the infrastructure challenge call for significant further progress.

Jonas Teusch is a Research Assistant at CEPS, and Arno Behrens is Head of Energy and a Research Fellow at CEPS. Christian Egenhofer is Head of the Energy and Climate programme and Senior Research Fellow at CEPS, as well as Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and Natolin in Warsaw, at SciencesPo in Paris and at the LUISS University in Rome.