The European Commission will bring forward measures to ease cross-border constraints in Europe’s energy system, with the stated aim of allowing electricity to move more freely across the bloc and limiting price spikes. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined the plan in Brussels on Tuesday, 16 September.
Speaking at a conference on EU competitiveness, von der Leyen said the executive would table a “European Grids Package” alongside a new “Energy Highways” initiative. The work will concentrate on eight critical bottlenecks in Europe’s energy infrastructure, ranging from the Pyrenees and the Trans-Balkan corridor to the Øresund Strait and the Sicilian Canal. She said the Commission would “liberate these bottlenecks one by one” and “step in with funding where necessary”. The Grids Package is intended to be published by the end of the year.
While the Commission framed the announcements around electricity market functioning, the references to both electricity interconnections and pipeline corridors reflect a wider focus on system integration. Congestion at key cross-border links has been a persistent source of regional price divergence, particularly when weather-dependent generation surges in one area cannot be exported to demand centres elsewhere. In practical terms, easing constraints at these eight locations is designed to reduce curtailment of low-cost generation, improve security of supply during stress events, and temper extreme price movements in wholesale markets.
The forthcoming European Grids Package follows the Commission’s February 2025 Action Plan for affordable energy, which trailed legislative proposals to accelerate permitting for grids, storage and renewables. That programme signalled a shift from emergency measures taken during the 2022–23 energy crisis towards structural changes aimed at expanding transmission capacity and speeding up delivery of network projects.
Although Brussels has not yet published a definitive list of the eight constrained sites, the examples cited by von der Leyen point to long-recognised pinch points. The Pyrenees have historically limited power exchange between Spain and France; the Øresund area sits on a major Nordic-continental interface; the Sicilian Canal is central to North–South flows in the central Mediterranean; and the Trans-Balkan corridor is a key axis in South-East Europe’s gas-to-power and renewables integration. Addressing these locations would align with existing regional planning exercises and with the EU’s objective of deeper market integration through enhanced interconnection.
The Commission’s intention to “step in with funding” suggests a blend of regulatory facilitation and financial support. In recent years, EU-level instruments such as the Connecting Europe Facility, cohesion policy funds and the Recovery and Resilience Facility have backed cross-border infrastructure where expected socio-economic benefits exceeded national budgets’ capacity. The Commission has also leaned on faster permitting and streamlined procurement to shorten project timelines. The Grids Package is expected to codify part of this approach while identifying where additional intervention is necessary to unlock stalled or under-sized links.
Energy costs remain a central concern in Europe’s broader competitiveness debate. At the same Brussels gathering on Tuesday, former ECB president Mario Draghi warned that the EU risks falling behind global peers absent faster reforms and greater investment, citing high energy prices as a constraint on industry. The Commission’s focus on grid bottlenecks complements that diagnosis by addressing one driver of price volatility and regional disparities within the single market.
In operational terms, relieving congestion at these sites should increase the effective capacity available to the day-ahead and intraday market coupling algorithms, enabling cheaper generation to be dispatched across borders more often. Over time, this can narrow price spreads between bidding zones, lower average wholesale prices in constrained regions, and reduce the need for costly redispatch and counter-trading actions by system operators. The effect is unlikely to be immediate: large interconnector upgrades and new corridors typically require multi-year development cycles. However, clear political prioritisation and targeted EU support can accelerate schemes already at an advanced stage of planning.
The “Energy Highways” label also points to an emphasis on meshed, high-capacity corridors rather than isolated point-to-point lines. In the electricity sector, that implies stronger links between major generation basins and load centres—across mountains, seas and straits—paired with digital upgrades that raise the utilisation of existing assets. For gas and hydrogen, it suggests preparing legacy pipelines and compressor stations for a diversified import mix and future low-carbon molecules where appropriate, while keeping the principal focus on system flexibility that supports electrification. The Commission’s messaging indicates these strands will be captured within a single, time-bound package to be presented before year-end.
Next steps will depend on the substance of the proposals and member states’ willingness to back them. National regulators and transmission system operators will be central to delivery, as will the selection of projects eligible for EU co-funding. With electricity demand expected to rise as heat, transport and parts of industry electrify, the Commission’s attempt to target known choke points is intended to produce early, visible benefits to consumers and businesses across multiple regions. The extent to which that stabilises prices will hinge on execution and on broader market conditions, but the policy direction is clear.
