The regulator's recent decision to reform grid connection procedures is a strong signal for our businesses and our economy. Fully in line with the direction set by the interfederal Make 2025-2030 plan, we are taking concrete action to unblock access to electrical power, strengthen predictability and support the industrial recovery.
Access to electrical power has become one of the major strategic challenges for our competitiveness. Manufacturers, SMEs, data centres, storage projects: all need reliable and fast access to the grid in order to invest, produce and innovate. In several regions, however, the saturation of available capacity and lengthening waiting lists are holding back projects.
Faced with this reality, inaction was no longer an option!
Concrete decisions
The decision adopted on 29 January by the Commission for Electricity and Gas Regulation (CREG) provides concrete and long-awaited answers. It aims to make connection procedures more efficient, more transparent and more predictable, while cleaning up the waiting lists that are currently slowing down the development of many projects.
The regulator is thus tackling so-called “dormant” capacities: projects that reserve power without ever coming to fruition and which block gigawatts essential to the real economy. Thanks to stricter requirements regarding the seriousness of applications and a reservation mechanism strictly limited in time under a “use it or lose it” type principle, available power will be better directed towards concrete projects that are useful to the economy and the energy transition.
This reform also refines the “first come, first served” principle by adapting it by category of use, to ensure a more coherent distribution aligned with grid development plans. The objective is clear: tackle blockages, ensure more strategic management of available capacity and favour those actors genuinely ready to invest. This is a pragmatic development, true to our liberal vision and based on clear rules, greater responsibility and efficient resource allocation in the service of growth.
In line with the Make 2025-2030 plan
Just a few days after the presentation of the guidelines of the Make 2025-2030 plan, we are already seeing measures emerge that are fully in line with our commitments: cleaning up waiting lists, tackling administrative blockages and directing available power towards projects useful to the economy and the energy transition.
The Make plan makes energy a central lever for the industrial recovery. This also means investing in infrastructure, modernising rules and working closely with the regulator, grid operators, economic actors and the Regions. The federal government has taken its responsibility by quickly putting solutions on the table.
For our businesses and SMEs, for investors, for those who want to develop projects in Belgium, the message is clear: we are securing access to power and strengthening the predictability of the framework.
The work continues to go even further. This decision nevertheless marks an important step: that of a State that creates the conditions for growth rather than holding it back.
A detailed article in Le Soir looks at this reform and its positive implications for the Belgian economy.