Europe’s drive to knit its power grids together — 235 priority cross-border projects, hundreds of millions of euros in new EU financing, and a Brussels package meant to speed up permitting — has run into a harder political reality this year: interconnection has become as much a matter of security and leverage as of engineering.
In April, the European Commission published its second list of Projects of Common Interest and Projects of Mutual Interest, naming 235 cross-border energy schemes eligible for streamlined permitting and EU financing. Just under half are electricity, offshore and smart-grid projects. The Commission followed in May with an indicative €600 million funding call tied to that list, run through the Connecting Europe Facility and open for applications until 30 September.
Not every government is rushing to build, though. In June, Sweden instructed grid operator Svenska kraftnät to shelve a planned upgrade of the Konti-Scan Connect cable to Denmark, after Energy Minister Ebba Busch accused Brussels of ignoring Swedish objections to the EU’s Grids Package — chiefly disputes over how congestion revenue may be spent and how much system planning should sit with Brussels rather than Stockholm. Some concessions have since been made, but Svenska kraftnät is now drafting a 2027–2029 investment plan that excludes the Denmark upgrade, a rare case of a member state pausing an EU-flagged interconnector on its own terms.
Security has moved to the centre of the same debate. Meeting in Luxembourg in June, EU energy ministers backed a revision to the TEN-E regulation that would let EU funds pay to repair undersea cables damaged by deliberate sabotage, a provision pushed by Finland, whose subsea links have repeatedly come under suspicion of tampering since 2023. In Poland, grid operator PSE ran a live exercise, “Blackout 2026,” simulating a physical attack on a high-voltage substation near Białystok, while PSE’s chief executive told a financial forum in Sopot that electrification is now a condition of national security and resilience, not only a climate target.
The common thread is that the EU’s grid build-out has stopped being purely a financing and permitting exercise. The 30 September deadline for the new CEF funding round will show how many of the 235 listed projects attract serious applicants; Sweden’s stance will test whether Brussels adjusts its rules for a reluctant member state; and the sabotage-repair provision, once finalised, will mark the clearest sign yet that Baltic Sea infrastructure security has been written into the EU’s core energy law.
