Day 3

Creating competitive energy markets through incentive regulation involves establishing open, transparent, and investment-attractive market structures that promote operational efficiency and technological innovation. By removing entry barriers and ensuring non-discriminatory third-party access to transmission and distribution networks, new generators, suppliers, and energy traders can participate under equal conditions. Transparent market rules, predictable regulatory frameworks, and accessible data on tariffs and system operations enhance investor confidence and facilitate regional market coupling and cross-border power exchange. Incentive-based regulatory mechanisms, such as performance-based ratemaking and revenue-cap models, strengthen market competitiveness by linking allowed revenues to cost efficiency, system reliability, and innovation performance—stimulating investment in grid modernization, advanced generation technologies, and renewable energy integration while ensuring economically efficient returns and maintaining a level playing field for all market participants

As the power industry transitions towards decarbonization and electrification accelerates, the importance of cost-benefit positively assessed, timely and efficiently executed grid investments for network development becomes clear. Further, transmission and distribution operators need to support more renewable connections, rising demand from heat pumps and electric vehicles, and manage new patterns of system congestion. To do this effectively, grid development plans are increasingly adopting flexible solutions, digital tools, and advanced forecasting techniques to make the most of existing infrastructure capacity and ensure reliable service over the long term.

On the regulatory side, how tariffs are designed plays a key role in guiding investment and influencing consumer behaviour. Modern approaches seek to balance cost recovery with fairness and efficiency, while providing network users with economic signals to reduce peak loads, therefore improving assets’ use; on the other hand, revenue mechanisms for grid operators are more and more performance-based, to ensure higher quality and to integrate as many as possible distributed resources. As energy transition costs rise, tariff structures must remain transparent, predictable, and aligned with the system's evolving needs.

This session will look at how regulatory frameworks and network development projects are assessed and approved by regulators, and how tariff methodologies can shape the speed and quality of grid development and performance. Through international case studies, it will showcase strategies that help accelerate grid upgrades, improve planning, and timely execution of investments, ensuring that tariff reforms promote efficient system use without compromising affordability for consumers. The discussion aims to provide practical insights for regulators addressing the infrastructure challenges of a decarbonising electricity sector.

What will energy systems physically look like in 2045, and what regulatory frameworks must we design today to realize them? This session explores the technical architecture of future regional energy systems and the institutional innovations required to enable their development within evolving regulatory paradigms.

By 2045, energy systems will be fundamentally transformed: predominantly renewable generation portfolios, bidirectional power flows from millions of distributed assets, sector coupling linking electricity with transport and heating, cross-border transmission networks enabling continental-scale resource optimization, and AI-driven system operations managing complexity at unprecedented scales. Designing these systems requires regulatory bodies to rethink traditional approaches to system planning, market design, technical standards, and infrastructure approval.

Regional integration amplifies both opportunities and regulatory complexities. Optimal 2045 system designs may require generation siting across borders, shared energy storage infrastructure, harmonized hydrogen transport networks, and coordinated flexibility markets. Yet current regulatory frameworks—built for centralized, fossil-dominated, nationally-bounded systems—struggle to accommodate these design imperatives.

This session examines how energy regulators can facilitate the design of 2045 energy systems through forward-looking regulation. Panelists will address critical design questions: determining optimal generation portfolios and transmission topologies for deeply decarbonized systems, regulating emerging technologies from long-duration storage to synthetic fuels, creating investment frameworks for decades-long infrastructure, and building regional regulatory coordination mechanisms that enable optimal system design without compromising national energy security or consumer protection.

Participants will explore regulatory innovations that bridge present institutions with future system requirements, ensuring that today's regulatory decisions enable rather than constrain the energy system designs necessary for 2045.

The global transition towards low-carbon and sustainable energy systems requires unprecedented levels of investment in renewable generation, grid modernization, energy storage, and emerging technologies, such as green hydrogen and carbon capture.
If for some countries sustainable energy sources are essential to ensure access to energy and/or safe energy sources, other countries struggle to reduce their emissions while their economy grows, electrifies or plans to reindustrialize.


While markets play an important role in mobilizing capital, regulatory frameworks often determine investor choices. Clear, stable, and forward-looking regulation can significantly reduce investor uncertainty, lower perceived risk, and create conditions that attract both domestic and international financing for the energy transition.
Regulatory signals are key to attract investment and target innovation. In this panel, we will discuss the importance of regulation to attract investment and what kind of policies can support it other than stability: cost-reflective tariffs, guaranteed offtake mechanisms, price signals, power purchase agreements (PPAs), contracts for difference (CFDs) and technological free areas, for instance. These instruments not only stimulate capital flows but also ensure that energy remains affordable for all.

As the retail energy market changes and price swings become more evident to consumers, empowering customers has become a vital part of modern energy regulation. Tools such as smart metering, dynamic tariffs, transparent billing, and improved access to consumption data are enabling households to take control of their energy consumption. These advancements also improve consumer rights, enhance market understanding, and encourage participation in new demand-side programs.

At the same time, energy poverty is becoming a problem in many areas, requiring targeted, data-driven solutions. Regulators are increasingly involved in developing social support systems that keep energy affordable while maintaining market efficiency, including lifeline tariffs, targeted subsidies, improved eligibility screening, and protections for vulnerable customers.

This session will explore how rules, market tools, and social policies work together to impact consumers. Using examples from around the world, it will show effective ways to identify vulnerable customers, increase transparency in retail markets, and implement protection programs that reduce energy poverty without interfering with competition. The goal is to provide practical ideas for regulators to strengthen both consumer empowerment and social resilience during the energy transition

Regulators, like all other entities, need a money stream to sustain their operation. As the role of the regulator is to be impartial in the energy market and to maintain independence of all market stakeholders, its finances should be diversified and should arrive from all of the stakeholders to ensure that no one has an upper hand in the regulations. This panel will explore how energy regulators finance their operations and how the different funding models impact the operation of the regulator and their independence. Speakers will share their experiences on the financing mechanisms used by their regulators along with the different available mechanisms (state budget allocations, licence fees, levies on market participants, contributions through consumer bills, etc...), and they will discuss how these mechanisms affect their autonomy and effectiveness. The objective is to provide insights on the pros and cons of the different ways of funding the regulators around the world, highlighting pathways to diversify income sources and the processes that enabled other regulators to achieve financial independence and sustainability.