What is congestion management?
Congestion management is a set of market mechanisms that let a grid operator keep offering capacity in a congested area by paying or contracting parties to use less capacity at peak moments, rather than refusing every new connection outright. It relieves pressure on the grid without waiting for physical expansion, which typically takes years.
Source: Enexis, "Maatschappelijk prioriteren".
What is GOPACS, and how does it turn flexibility into a market?
GOPACS is a joint platform run by all seven Dutch grid operators, including TenneT, Enexis, Liander and Stedin, that coordinates congestion-management solutions and gives transparent insight into where flexibility is needed. It connects businesses that can shift consumption or production away from peak times with grid operators that need exactly that flexibility, through named product types (capacity-limiting and capacity-steering contracts, redispatch, and mandatory-bidding contracts), in exchange for financial reward or improved connection prospects.
Source: GOPACS.
Why does a battery or flexible load count differently here than elsewhere?
Under the Dutch priority framework, a connection that demonstrably frees up grid capacity for others, a congestion easer, sits in the top priority category, ahead of a plain generation or storage connection. TenneT's contract with Green Energy Storage for a roughly 200 MW, 800 MWh battery in Oosterhout is a concrete example: the battery qualifies for priority treatment specifically because of its documented relief effect on the local grid, not simply because it is a battery.
This is the commercial hook: a flexible asset that is only designed to consume or discharge power does not automatically get priority. One designed and contracted to relieve a specific, named constraint can move to the front of the queue and can also earn revenue through GOPACS for doing so.
Source: TenneT, "Contract met Green Energy Storage".
What happens when congestion management alone is not enough?
When the regular voluntary and mandatory phases of congestion management on existing connections do not free up enough flexibility to solve off-take congestion, a grid operator can run a flex tender as a last-resort measure, asking the market for flexible capacity at a specific location. Flex tenders are technology-neutral: in practice this can mean batteries, but in the most extreme case it can also mean temporarily deploying gas-fired generation to prevent overload, a trade-off the national programme is explicit about not wanting to rely on more than necessary.
Source: Kamerbrief Voortgang aanpak Netcongestie, 2 April 2026, page 4.
Decision lens
If a project includes any flexible or storage element, treat "can this qualify as a congestion easer, and can it participate via GOPACS" as a design question from the start, not an afterthought. The qualification and the revenue both depend on documenting the asset's actual relief effect, which is far easier to build in at the design stage than to retrofit later.
See also: the glossary entries for congestion management, GOPACS and congestion easer, and the congestion easer explainer for the priority-category detail.
This explainer is evergreen and updated if the underlying mechanisms or GOPACS product set change. To respond or flag an update: [email protected].