Finland Plans Four-Tier Grid Queue to Ease Connection Bottlenecks

Finland is moving to overhaul how electricity grid capacity is allocated among competing applicants, proposing a tiered priority system that ranks new consumers and standalone battery storage against each other rather than against conventional generation.

The government’s proposed amendments to the Electricity Market Act would divide all new connection requests into four categories. The first covers households, small and medium-sized enterprises, charging points drawing under 3 MW, data centres below 1 MW, and critical infrastructure. The second tier spans industrial consumers and data centres in the 3–100 MW and 1–10 MW ranges respectively; larger facilities may also qualify if they commit to delivering demand flexibility of at least 80 percent of peak load. A third group captures sites that exceed those thresholds, while a fourth category is reserved exclusively for standalone battery energy storage systems that are not attached to generation assets and draw their charge directly from the network.

The government says the structure is designed to encourage large electricity users to site new capacity in regions where the grid is less congested. Climate and Environment Minister Sari Multala highlighted reduced prices, lower deficit risk, and avoiding unnecessary grid expansion as key objectives.

Officials stressed that the reform does not remove grid operators’ obligation to connect customers, nor does it alter the underlying right to connection — it only sets the order in which constrained capacity is assigned.

The changes are proposed to take effect on 1 January 2027. A public consultation runs until 9 October, and the new rules are intended to apply to existing applications for which no connection agreement has been signed by that date.

Source: PV Magazine