The Tripartite Agreement gives Europe’s storage ambitions a shared direction
taking the best practice each of these national models represents and applying it within the regulatory regime each country already has. Bringing resources online is not just a case of solving the physical connection, though: the commercial part can often be challenging, too. Getting every party behind a single connection point – which might include the generator, demand customer, and potentially multiple off-takers – to agree on how the asset will be operated and paid for is not necessarily easy. There are technical considerations, too. A battery co-located with a wind farm and a data centre might be expected to provide both long-duration storage and fast-acting ancillary services. However, each use-case can call for a different battery specification. A system providing one is not available for the other at the same time. These are solvable problems, but they do take good-faith negotiation. Lessons from UK connection reform The UK has its own problems when it comes to grid connections. This challenge is further highlighted by the oversubscription of battery projects within the CP2030 Action Plan, where battery connection applications currently exceed available capacity by approximately 61GW, underlining the need for continued connection reform and more flexible approaches to grid access.
However, it also offers lessons for the wider European grid network. Reforms to the National Energy System Operator (NESO)’s connections queue (NESO, 2026) have moved the UK system from a first-come, first-served model – which became clogged with hundreds of gigawatts of largely undeliverable generation and storage projects – towards one that prioritises schemes that are genuinely ready to build. The reformed queue has reduced from around 700GW of applications to approximately 300GW, removing around 400GW of stalled or non-viable projects and freeing up capacity for schemes that can genuinely proceed. Ofgem’s own figures put the effect at around 7.8GW of energy assets of which connection dates have been brought forward by an average of six years (Ofgem, 2026b). That is a substantial acceleration, and one that Europe’s own grid operators, working through their own versions of queue reform, could plausibly replicate. The IDNO model also offers an example of what can happen when you break the geographical link between network operators and their assets. Unlike the UK’s distribution network operators (DNOs) and most of their European counterparts, IDNOs are not tied to a single site or region. An IDNO can own and operate assets in Scotland and in Gloucestershire under the same licence. That portability lets IDNOs spread fixed costs such
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