Finland would sort grid connection requests into four priority groups
Serguey Asael Shinder3 min readFinland's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment circulated a draft amendment to the Electricity Market Act for comment on 18 September 2026. We read the ministry's own release rather than a summary of it: the draft would oblige network operators to apply a priority procedure when handling requests to connect electricity consumption sites and electricity storage in places where capacity is scarce. Electricity production is excluded from the procedure.
Requests would fall into four groups by capacity and purpose. The first takes consumers, small and medium-sized enterprises and charging points below 3 MW, data centres up to 1 MW, and facilities serving critical societal functions. The second takes consumption sites between 3 MW and 100 MW and data centres between 1 MW and 10 MW — and larger sites can join it by committing to flexibility covering at least 80% of peak demand. The third holds larger consumption sites and data centres above those limits. The fourth holds standalone storage that is not part of a power plant complex and charges from the grid.
The group then determines the order in which the operator — transmission system operator Fingrid or the local distribution operator — provides capacity and develops its network when it cannot serve everyone at once. The ministry adds a mechanism the trade coverage tends to leave out: a customer in a congested area can improve its position not only by offering weather-independent flexible generation but also by covering part of its own consumption with new generation in the same area, and the operator must still weigh how fast the site is actually being built.
Minister of Climate and the Environment Sari Multala frames it as an incentive to lower prices and shortage risk while avoiding transmission lines that need not be built — in her words, restraining the growth of transmission prices.
The ministry states plainly what the proposal is not: it does not restrict access to the network, the obligation to connect customers remains unchanged, and the rules on the right to connect are untouched.
Two dates to hold on to. Comments close on 9 October 2026. Entry into force is planned for 1 January 2027, and the act would also reach connection requests submitted before then where no connection agreement — conditional agreements included — had been concluded.
What it means
This is queue management dressed as siting policy, which is the honest way to do it. Nobody is refused a connection; the ranking decides who waits. That is a smaller intervention than a moratorium and a much larger one than a tariff, because it changes where a large load would rather be built without anyone having to forbid a location.
Putting standalone storage in the bottom group is the decision to argue about. A battery charging from the grid is ranked below every category of consumption, including large data centres. Yet storage is one of the few things that makes an existing connection point carry more energy over a day. The proposal treats it as demand; its value to the operator is that it is flexible demand.
The 80% flexibility threshold is the number that will be negotiated. It is the price of promotion from group three to group two, and it is written as a share of peak demand rather than as hours or availability. How it is measured, and against which peak, decides whether the mechanism does anything.
Sources: https://tem.fi/en/-/proposal-on-priority-procedure-for-electricity-network-connections-circulated-for-review and https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/21/finland-proposes-priority-system-for-grid-connections/