ESEC 2026 Policy Session Are the FNAs Working (2026)

Notes on a policy session at the Energy Storage Europe conference (ESEC 2026), 6 October 2026, “Are the Flexibility Needs Assessments Working?”, known through the organiser’s announcement and ACER’s Leandro Lind’s LinkedIn post of 8 October. The first raw is the maintainer’s staging note holding the quoted passages; the second is ACER’s own flexibility page, fetched to confirm the timeline. The session produced no numbers, and there is no organiser recap beyond the posts.

The session

• Question: whether national flexibility needs assessments (FNAs) deliver clear and actionable market signals, how national approaches compare, and how FNA results shape investment and policy.
• Panel: Leandro Lind (ACER), David Pozo Camara (European Commission), moderated by Thomas Lewis (CAN Europe).
• Takeaway as posted: FNAs are a useful first step in identifying the scale and type of flexibility Europe needs; the next challenge is turning them into clear national objectives and investment signals, keeping the assessment of system needs technology-neutral and improving the methodology over time.

ACER’s timeline (from ACER’s flexibility page)

Each Member State conducts a national FNA with the new methodology by July 2026, submits it to ACER and the Commission, and uses the findings to define indicative national targets for non-fossil flexibility by January 2027. ACER then publishes an EU-wide report on flexibility needs with recommendations on cross-border issues by July 2027, identifying gaps between assessed needs and the availability of flexibility.

Relevance

Shows the policy debate has moved from producing FNAs to using them: the next step is the indicative-target step that, in Sweden, Ei R2026:07 has addressed with a proposed target of 0 MW. See Flexibility Need Assessment, ACER and the same-day DRESG meeting on NC DR (Source - DRESG 3rd Meeting (2026-10-06)), which is a different forum.

Limits of this summary

Built from the maintainer’s staging note and ACER’s page. The LinkedIn posts themselves were not re-read, and a claim seen in a search that only 14 national FNA reports had been found by early September 2026 is unverified and not used.