The European Commission is making a clear bet: without modern grids, Europe will remain stuck with high energy prices and vulnerable supply chains. In Brussels today, the Commission unveiled its European Grids Package alongside a new Energy Highways initiative, two pillars of an aggressive plan to rewire the continent’s energy backbone for a future defined by electrification, clean power, and geopolitical resilience.
The argument behind the package is blunt. Europe’s grids were never designed for the scale and direction of today’s energy flows. To unlock cheaper renewables and allow power to move seamlessly across borders, the infrastructure needs both expansion and a strategic redesign. The Commission says this upgrade is essential if Europe hopes to lower household energy bills, integrate low-cost clean energy, and decisively move away from dependence on Russian imports.
What makes this proposal different is the shift in mindset. The Grids Package positions infrastructure planning as a pan-European exercise rather than a patchwork of national priorities. It lays out faster permitting timelines, encourages coordinated investments, and introduces a more equitable approach to sharing the costs of cross-border projects. The premise is simple: the benefits of interconnected infrastructure spill across borders, so the financial burden should be shared transparently too.
To make these ambitions investable, the Commission is also pushing new financing mechanisms. Project bundling, combining multiple infrastructure components under special-purpose vehicles, is being promoted as a way to attract additional capital and streamline delivery. And because many of these cross-border lines support markets far beyond their host regions, the Commission is pressing for clearer rules that link cost-sharing to real system benefits.
The Energy Highways initiative, announced earlier by President Ursula von der Leyen in her 2025 State of the Union, targets the eight most critical infrastructure corridors requiring urgent, short-term political support. These projects were chosen for their strategic value in completing the Energy Union and their dependence on unified EU-level backing to move forward at speed. Brussels plans to fast-track them through tighter political coordination, active involvement of European coordinators, and close work with the Energy Union Task Force.
From here, the legislative package heads to the Parliament and Council for debate. Meanwhile, the Commission will continue its parallel work with Member States on key cross-border projects already listed under the latest edition of Europe’s Projects of Common and Mutual Interest. These conversations will also feed into wider efforts to accelerate permitting for renewables, storage sites, and EV charging infrastructure, areas still slowed by administrative bottlenecks.
The backdrop to this push is stark. Europe remains far from the 2030 goal of 15% electricity interconnection between Member States, and the consequences are visible in consumer bills. Fossil fuels still made up 70% of the EU’s gross energy use in 2022, with 98% of the oil and gas coming from imports, a dependency that keeps Europe exposed to global market shocks. In 2024, industrial electricity prices in the EU averaged €0.199 per kWh, more than double China’s levels and nearly triple U.S. prices. In early 2025, household electricity prices ranged from €0.3835 per kWh in Germany to €0.1040 in Hungary; non-household prices showed similarly wide gaps.
Europe’s fragmented grid planning and underinvestment in infrastructure have become structural economic disadvantages.
To close this gap, Brussels is preparing a large increase in financial firepower. In the proposed 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, the budget for the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Energy programme jumps from €5.84 billion to €29.91 billion, a fivefold boost. Public funds are expected to be paired with a new Clean Energy Investment Strategy aimed at mobilising private capital at scale.
For the Commission, this is a structural reset of Europe’s energy system, designed to bring down costs, strengthen security, and support a grid capable of handling a fully electrified economy.
