Last week, researchers from GCELS travelled to Copenhagen for the 13th edition of the European Environmental Law Forum (EELF) 2026, hosted by CLIMA, the Centre for Climate Change Law and Governance at the University of Copenhagen. It was a proud moment for GCELS too: our own Lorenzo Squintani chairs the EELF Managing Board and opened this year’s conference, themed ‘Climate Change Mitigation and EU Law – Towards a Just and Competitive Sustainable Transition.’ In his opening remarks, he pointed to the ‘wall of knowledge’ gathered in the room that day, underlining how the connections made over the conference are themselves part of what drives a just and competitive sustainable transition forward.

Across the conference, our colleagues presented on a wide sweep of EU energy and climate law, and a few common threads ran through the sessions: regulation is racing to keep up with fast-moving technology, and ambitious targets keep outpacing the legal frameworks meant to deliver them, and almost every challenge eventually comes back to the same question: how do you turn climate ambition into something financeable, adaptable, and fair in practice?

At sea, the transition to hydrogen-based fuels brings the relationship between regulation, investment and infrastructure into sharp focus. Kelsey Pailman  examined how EU instruments such as FuelEU Maritime and the extended EU ETS are encouraging shipping towards alternative fuels, including hydrogen-based fuels. Yet regulatory incentives alone cannot deliver the infrastructure needed for their uptake. Hydrogen production and bunkering depend on bankable demand. That is where fit-for-purpose offtake agreements come in, translating regulatory pressure into revenue certainty investors can actually finane.

A similar mix of ambition and governance gaps runs through the offshore wind sector. Donia Ayari examined the shift from radial offshore wind connections to meshed grids built on multi-vendor HVDC systems. This is infrastructure that could let multiple wind farms and countries share transmission capacity, strengthening European competitiveness and avoiding lock-in to a single supplier. The catch, as with the maritime fuel question, is that today’s electricity governance is built around national planning, while meshed grids need multilateral coordination and shared technical standards across operators and suppliers.  

Apostolia Pataki picked up a related thread from the planning side: floating offshore wind is central to unlocking deep-water sites, but maritime spatial planning (MSP) was never built for technologies that are still evolving. Her research asks whether the proportionality principle can help planners balance investment security against environmental protection and adaptability, a question made timely by the European Commission’s plans for an Ocean Act to update the current MSP Directive.

Space at sea is not the only constraint on offshore wind; grid capacity is another. Liv Malin Andreasson examined the Dutch ambition to reach 70 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2050, where scarce sea space and the scale of expansion create technical challenges, including transporting electricity to shore and managing intermittency. She showed that co-locating storage and hydrogen production within wind farm areas could address both the spatial constraint and these technical issues. However, she argued that neither Dutch nor EU law was designed with such co-location in mind, leaving authorisation, connection and grid access fragmented across frameworks that have not kept pace with policy ambition.

Back onshore, Jamie Behrendt presented her work in collaboration with Edwin Woerdman and turned to a more everyday consequence of the energy transition: rising electricity bills, driven partly by network tariffs that were never designed for a world of energy communities and microgrids. Combining legal and economic analysis, they argue for fairness as a balancing principle, operationalised through cost causation, users paying in proportion to the costs they actually impose on the grid, and land on a hybrid tariff model combining a fixed infrastructure fee with a dynamic, usage-based charge.

Financial resources and law collide even more directly in Berfu Beysülen Angın’s work on investor-state disputes. As states unwind fossil fuel subsidies and redesign renewable support schemes, they are facing claims from both hydrocarbon and renewable investors under treaties like the Energy Charter Treaty. Building on earlier work identifying gaps in how these disputes are resolved, Berfu proposes a more structured adjudication framework, tested against the wave of arbitrations that followed Spain’s changes to its renewable energy incentives. The core argument: the fix is not abandoning investor-state dispute settlement, but reforming it so that public interst considerations are taken into account.

Predictability and fairness came up again, from a different angle, in Alba Forns Gómez’s research on public participation. EU treaties and the Aarhus Convention already guarantee a right to participate in energy decisions, but in practice vulnerable groups are often least able to exercise it. Alba’s survey across Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany found strong public support for positive-action measures that improve access, though she is careful to note that access alone risks becoming ‘fake participation’ unless it comes with a genuine redistribution of decision-making power.

Finally, Álvaro Martín Morán, who has in the past been a GCELS visiting researcher, presented alongside Endrius Cocciolo, their work on Energy Communities in Catalonia. Bolstered by recent Spanish and Catalan decree-laws, these communities rely heavily on battery storage for short-term flexibility, but batteries cannot solve seasonal storage. Their research explores renewable hydrogen as a complementary long-term storage vector, and cooperative hydrogen hubs as shared infrastructure that could let community-led initiatives aggregate production without needing to operate like utility-scale players.

Taken together, these presentations are a reminder of how closely the green and digital transition are now intertwined. Meshed HVDC grids depend on interoperable digital standards as much as cables and steel; smart, dynamic network tariffs only work with the metering and data infrastructure to support them; and even citizen participation increasingly runs through digital platforms that shape who actually gets heard. The EU frames the green and digital transition as mutually reinforcing goals, but as this week in Copenhagen showed, the law is still catching up to that reality.

Our GCELS members enjoyed their time in Copenhagen and the connections made. Thank you to CLIMA and the University of Copenhagen for hosting us and see you all at edtion 14 of the EELF in 2027.

By Jamie Behrendt, Assistant Professor - Groningen Centre of Energy Law and Sustainability