ACER's 5.4 billion euro congestion bill and Liander's queue: Europe is short of wires
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readTwo pieces of news this week look at different scales of the same problem. On 4 November ACER's 2026 Monitoring Report put the cost of managing grid congestion in the EU at 5.4 billion euros in 2025, up from 4.3 billion a year earlier, and found that the rule requiring at least 70% of capacity to be offered for cross-border trade is still not fully applied. Two days earlier the Dutch operator Liander said it cannot connect new customers in sixteen Gelderland municipalities from January and put them on a waiting list until at least July 2027.
At continental scale the constraint shows up as money. Price differences between bidding zones are widening, ACER says, and intraday and balancing markets suffer most from limited cross-zonal access. Redispatch is how operators pay for a network that cannot carry what the market schedules, and that bill grew by more than a quarter in one year.
At local scale it shows up as a queue. Liander's October update listed 14 new bottlenecks for large connections, 11 of them on the consumption side rather than feed-in. The Dutch prioritisation rules introduced in July already rank who gets scarce capacity first, with grid-safety measures and congestion-reducing parties at the top.
The two are linked by the same physical fact: the energy exists, but the wires to move it to where it is wanted do not, or not yet. ACER's remedy is to apply existing rules fully; Liander's is flexible capacity and faster expansion with TenneT. Neither release suggests the gap will close quickly.
What it means
For developers and large consumers in Europe, the scarce input is now a connection date. Market reforms help the price; only steel in the ground shortens the queue.