On 14 March 2024 the director of the ACM, the Netherland’s energy market authority, announced that ACM will tolerate the use of cable pooling for batteries in anticipation of new legislation formally allowing cable pooling for installations other than wind and solar parks. Cable pooling, which allows different installations to share a single grid connection, can help solve current congestion on the electricity grid. Pursuant to article 1.7 of the Dutch Electricity Act 1998, a wind park and a solar park in close proximity but owned by different parties can share a connection, provided the total connection capacity is at least 2 MVA. No reference, however, has been made for connection sharing with other installations. Consequently, cable pooling is currently not allowed for any other types of installations (e.g. battery storage systems). As a result, a proposal to allow cable pooling for battery storage systems was included in the Bill to amend the Dutch Electricity Act and the Act on Environmental Taxes. This will implement the phase-out of the net-metering scheme (sal­der­ing­s­reg­eling), which obligates energy suppliers to deduct the surplus solar power generated by households that is fed back into the grid from the amount of power that households consume from the grid. Given that the envisaged phase out of this scheme was deemed controversial, the Senate last month rejected the Bill in its entirety. This brings a solution for cable pooling for battery storage back to square one, as it means that parties must in principle wait for the introduction of the Bill for the Energy Act (Energiewet), which is to replace the Electricity Act and the Gas Act and will expand cable pooling to installations of production, storage, conversion, or consumption of elec­tri­city. Cur­rently, however, it is not clear if, and if so when, the Bill for the Energy Act will be adopted. The Minister for Energy Policy recently expressed the intention to amend the Electricity Act on this point. With the timing of this amendment not yet known and expected to take some time, the ACM announced at the Energy Storage and Distribution congress held in Utrecht on 14 March that it will tolerate grid operators and connected parties engaging in cable pooling for batteries and other installations, provided that this complies with the conditions set out in the Energy Bill. This includes the obligation to report the envisaged cable pooling to the ACM. We expect this decision to be very welcome since there have been frequent calls to allow cable pooling for batteries.

ESG: Environmental, Social & Governance

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