Executive Summary

If enacted substantially in the form analysed here, the EU Grids Package would move electricity-network planning upstream by formalising infrastructure-needs identification, broadening national TYNDP duties and preserving a PCI architecture that can already accommodate internal projects with significant cross-border effects. The residual problem is narrower: what happens when a need endorsed at Union level is still not fully met by the Union-wide TYNDP portfolio at the close of the Article 13 matching exercise for the relevant needs-report cycle, but the same system need is later addressed, wholly or partly, by an objectively off-list national measure? At that hand-off, the framework would not necessarily preserve a need-specific, reviewable link between the European need, the national response and any cross-border benefits produced by that response. This article proposes two residual safeguards, not a parallel PCI regime: a need-response obligation for materially implicated national plans and a tightly conditioned functional-benefit gateway for qualifying off-list measures. Benefit would open an assessment, not create liability to pay. The objective is to preserve the need through the planning chain and permit proportionate cost attribution only where demonstrated external net benefits justify it, without displacing national investment autonomy or the PCI process.