ACER publishes today its Opinion on the draft TYNDP 2026 Scenarios Report prepared by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity and Gas (ENTSO-E and ENTSOG) under the TEN-E Regulation.
These scenarios, produced every two years, provide the common foundation for EU-wide electricity, gas and hydrogen infrastructure planning, and feed into the Ten-Year Network Development Plans (TYNDPs).
What are the key findings?
ACER welcomes the significant work by ENTSO-E and ENTSOG to improve the scenarios’ accuracy, including:
-
the continued delivery of joint scenarios combining electricity, gas and hydrogen;
-
the introduction of economic variants (high- and low-growth cases applied to the central scenario to assess the robustness of the underlying economic assumptions);
-
the involvement of the Stakeholder Reference Group; and
-
the development of an Innovation Roadmap.
ACER also identifies two main areas for improvement:
-
Alignment with EU climate and energy targets. The current methodology enables formal compliance with EU targets, but ACER considers that it does not adequately capture the structural changes needed to achieve those targets in practice.
-
Stronger economic variants. These should function as meaningful alternative scenarios, with greater transparency and consultation on key scenario assumptions and infrastructure planning inputs, improved consistency with the European Resource Adequacy Assessment (ERAA) and a more timely scenario development process.
What are the next steps?
For the finalisation of the TYNDP 2026 Scenarios Report, ACER calls on ENTSOs to improve transparency on the remaining gap to EU climate and energy targets and the limitations of the current methodology.
For future cycles, ACER expects further improvements in EU targets alignment, economic variants, consistency with ERAA, stakeholder consultation and the overall timeliness of the process.
