Prop. 2025/26:26 Regelverket för Framtidens El- och Gasnät (2025)

Proposition 2025/26:26, “Regelverket för framtidens el- och gasnät”, submitted to the Riksdag 2 October 2025 (Klimat- och näringslivsdepartementet; Ebba Busch). 403pp. The government’s final legislative response to Dir. 2022:20 and SOU 2023:64, resolving how Sweden brings ellagen and naturgaslagen into compliance with the CJEU’s Tysklandsdomen (Case C-718/18, Commission v. Germany). Preceded by a lagrådsremiss dated 7 August 2025 (Lagrådets yttrande is Bilaga 7 to this proposition; the government followed Lagrådet’s drafting suggestions with only minor further language edits).

The Tysklandsdomen problem

The CJEU held that a national regulatory authority (Ei, for Sweden) must have exclusive competence to set or approve at least the methods for calculating network-access tariffs and connection terms, independent of government or the legislature — the legislature cannot pre-empt that discretion by writing overly detailed substantive criteria into statute. Because Sweden’s ellagen ch. 5 (intäktsram) and ch. 4 (connection/transfer conditions) contain detailed statutory criteria of exactly this kind, the ruling directly implicated Swedish law.

What changes (electricity)

• Revenue-cap basis simplified in statute, detail moved to föreskrifter (§6.1–6.2): the ellagen no longer specifies that the intäktsram must cover costs of “a network operation with similarly objective conditions run in an efficient and purposeful manner,” full depreciation, and a return matching alternative-investment risk. Instead, ellagen states only that the cap must not exceed what the DSO needs for its network operations — with “need” explicitly including necessary investment to meet the DSO’s statutory grid-function obligations (3 kap. 1 §). The government or Ei gets authority to issue föreskrifter filling in what “needs for the network operation” means and how costs are calculated — the enabling delegation SOU 2023:64 recommended and that Ei’s RP5/TOTEX methodology (already documented at RP5 Revenue Cap Methodology (2028–2031) › Capital base valuation — normvärdering) depends on.
• The term “kapitalbas” (capital base) leaves ellagen (“utgår begreppet kapitalbas från den lagen”; it survives in the LOSI law, lag 2021:311) — capital-cost calculation becomes purely a matter for Ei’s föreskrifter, not statute.
• Efficient-utilisation and flexibility-service incentives stay in ellagen (they implement the EU energy-efficiency directive and are not Tysklandsdomen-implicated), continuing to allow cap increases/decreases based on efficient grid utilisation and flexibility-service use.
• Särskilt investeringsutrymme (LOSI) is NOT repealed — reversing SOU 2023:64’s main recommendation. The government’s reasoning (§6.4): the ability to use a historical (2012–2015) deficit for investment is a different question from Ei’s exclusive tariff-setting authority; Ei still decides the cap itself, LOSI just governs how a specific historical deficit may be used. Extending this to two tillsynsperioder (rather than one) is also found compatible with Ei’s independence. Rejected too, however, is extending general överrullning to two periods — the inquiry’s proposal (conditional on Ei finding “special reasons”) is dropped as unlikely to meaningfully help DSO planning while adding administrative complexity; the one-period carry-forward rule stays as-is.
• Nätnyttoersättning (grid-benefit compensation for production feed-in) is NOT repealed — again reversing SOU 2023:64. The government finds this producer fee-offset does not implicate Ei’s exclusive tariff-setting authority and serves a legitimate incentive function (rewarding production sited where it reduces network losses/upstream subscription costs).
• Connection-fee provisions: detailed statutory rules on connection-fee design, the microproduction fee exemption, and the DSO’s duty to publish cost-allocation principles are removed from ellagen (4 kap.), delegated to föreskrifter on the same independence logic. The förtida delning rule (state-financed capacity expansion enabling renewable connections) is also removed, with a grandfather clause for existing state-financed agreements.
• Economic experts on court panels (ch. 14): courts will include ekonomiska experter only in cases on the size of the intäktsram and on a company’s right to recover a deficit in the next tillsynsperiod (“avgränsa deltagandet”) — not every intäktsram case; (non-legal economic experts) alongside judges, modeled on the precedent under the Electronic Communications Act (lagen om elektronisk kommunikation) — PTS’s “goda erfarenheter” (indirect speech, translated) with that model is cited. Domarnämnden (the Judges Proposals Board) will appoint the experts; simple cases and leave-to-appeal questions are exempted. Experts need general economic expertise, not sector-specific knowledge — the inquiry found that more general competence is common among economic experts in other legal areas and among experts previously called by the parties (courts had in fact declined Ei’s requests for expert opinions).
• Court-instance/appeals scope (the claim that stakeholders wanted a two-instance simplification and the government rejected it is not in the raw): Kammarrätten i Jönköping itself argued the existing regulation does not actually conflict with EU law and that simple-case exemptions should also cover cases about whether Ei acted within regeringsformen/EU law — the government proceeds with the original expert-panel approach regardless.

Natural gas (parallel, materially similar) changes

Chapters 9–13 apply an equivalent restructuring to naturgaslagen ch. 6–7 (intäktsram, connection, balansansvar for transmission/distribution/storage/förgasning). Distinct feature: gas intäktsramar do not cover connection fees (unlike electricity), so Ei’s ex-ante review of gas connection-fee methods is broader by necessity.

Entry into force

• Naturgaslagen changes: 1 January 2026.
• Ellagen changes, LOSI amendments, and förvaltningsdomstolslagen changes for electricity cases: 1 January 2027 — timed so the new rules apply to the first revenue-cap decisions covering tillsynsperioder starting after 31 December 2027 (i.e. RP5, 2028–2031) and 31 December 2026 for gas. Existing caps for the current periods are explicitly grandfathered under the old rules.
• Government explicitly rejected the inquiry’s original 1 January 2025 target, citing (per Energiföretagen’s and others’ remiss input) Ei’s need for lead time to draft new föreskrifter, consistent with the delayed timeline the dissenting särskilt yttrande had argued for.

Relationship to the Elmarknadslag recast

This proposition amends the existing ellagen (1997:857) in place (enacted as SFS 2025:1345), introducing new chapters 5 (Intäktsram), 13 (Förseningsavgifter), 14 (Straff), and 15 (Överklagande och handläggning i domstol), with the electricity provisions taking effect 1 January 2027. The wiki separately documents Elmarknadslag (SFS 2026:1281) — adopted by the Riksdag 15 June 2026 (Prop. 2025/26:240, “Nya lagar om elsystemet”) — which wholesale repeals and replaces the entire ellagen with a new 21-chapter act, also in force 1 January 2027, using different chapter numbering (intäktsram is ch. 9, not ch. 5). This proposition itself makes no reference to the later law (it predates it), but Prop. 2025/26:240 does reference this one: its section-by-section commentary states that the new provisions correspond to the ellagen “i dess lydelse enligt SFS 2025:1345” and cites prop. 2025/26:26 page ranges for the intäktsram, connection-fee and tariff-delegation provisions, and its proposed lag 2.18 provides that lag (2025:1345) om ändring i ellagen “ska utgå”. So this proposition’s Tysklandsdomen-driven substance is carried forward into the Elmarknadslag rather than commencing and being repealed on the same day. (Raw: Raw/PDF extractions/nya-lagar-om-elsystemet-prop.-202526240-hela-dokumentet/.)

Relevance to the wiki

Resolves the long-open data gap on Ei (“SOU 2023:64 legislative process status”) and supplies the missing enabling-legislation step behind Ei’s RP5/TOTEX capital-valuation reform (already at RP5 Revenue Cap Methodology (2028–2031) › Capital base valuation — normvärdering) and the Swedish DSO Tariff Reform — Three Parallel Tracks (2025–2027) Track 1 timeline. Confirms LOSI and nätnyttoersättning both survive intact, and that the Tysklandsdomen concerns raised by Konkurrensverket‘s later 2026 review are procedurally distinct from (and unaffected by) this reform, since Konkurrensverket’s argument is about the capital-valuation methodology itself (nuanskaffningsvärde/BKI), which this bill delegates to Ei’s föreskrifter rather than resolving directly.