Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment has circulated a draft amendment to the Electricity Market Act that would oblige network operators to rank connection requests from large electricity consumers and storage facilities into four priority groups when grid capacity is scarce. Comments are open until 9 October 2026, and the ministry wants the new rules in force on 1 January 2027.
The proposal responds to a queue that has built up as electrification, new types of demand and a rapid growth in battery storage compete for the same connection points. The ministry says parts of the Finnish network have at times become congested despite ongoing expansion. The priority procedure would apply to consumption sites and electricity storages only; electricity generation would remain outside its scope.
Under the draft, the priority order and group would decide the sequence in which the transmission system operator Fingrid or the local distribution operator allocates capacity and develops its network when it cannot serve everyone at once. Large consumers in congested areas could move up the queue by committing to provide flexible, weather-independent generation capacity, or by covering part of their consumption with new production in the same area. The stated aim is to steer heavy loads and storage towards less congested parts of the grid.
“With this change, we want to motivate high electricity consumers to take measures that lower electricity prices and reduce the risk of shortages, such as the incentive to offer weather-independent flexible production capacity to the market. At the same time, we will avoid the need to build unnecessary transmission connections and thereby restrain the growth of transmission prices,” said Minister of Climate and the Environment Sari Multala.
The ministry stresses that the obligation to connect customers would not change and that the rules on the right to connect would remain as they are. The act would also cover pending requests for which no connection agreement or conditional agreement has been signed before it enters into force, and network operators would have to process the first group-specific batches by 31 December 2027. For the Baltic region’s wind developers, the change matters mainly on the demand side: Finland has been positioning itself as a destination for data centres, hydrogen electrolysers and other large loads that are meant to absorb its growing onshore and offshore wind output, and the draft sets out how those loads will be ordered when the grid cannot take them all at once.
