E.DSO’s Secretary General foresees focus on 'policy implementation’ by DSOs

As the new European Commission emerges, E.DSO Secretary General Charles Esser expects the focus to be on the ‘tweaks’ rather than on the more ambitious policy objectives of hitherto.

“There are tweaks we can do to get grids to be an enabler and not be a roadblock and I expect the focus in the next five years to be on those smaller things that might seem less ambitious to the outside world rather than on another Green Deal,” Esser told Enlit World’s Brussels Editor, Areti Ntaradimou in conversation at EU Sustainable Energy Week.

“It will be about implementation,” he anticipates, drawing from the conclusions of the last Energy Council meeting and conversations with EU officials.

He also points to the importance of competition globally and regardless of the advances of other countries or regions of the world, says progress in Europe is about setting an example and it is good for energy security.

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Esser, who joined E.DSO in December 2023 and took over as Secretary General on 1 January 2024, says the two key focuses for the organisation currently are on expanding the membership and on the EU Horizon-supported energy projects.

“Our intent is not to have as many DSOs as possible but to maximise the number of European customers who are in our membership,” he says, commenting that E.DSO is the only electricity-only association in Europe at the distribution level.

Primarily the focus has been on the large and medium size DSOs and whether more small DSOs – less than 100,000 customers – will be encouraged is open to question, he adds. With the exemptions they have under EU law, such as being exempt from network development plans, their requirements to be discussed at E.DSO committee level may be different.

On the project front, the aim is to expand participation in order to enable the member DSOs to gain more knowledge and access to innovation.

“I want to make sure that the knowledge from those projects diffuses into our membership,” he comments, saying that too often projects come to an end without further real-life extension or implementation elsewhere.

“The projects can help us get to where we need to go in terms of finding new innovations and E.DSO and the EU more broadly needs to do more to think about making sure the projects feed into reality."