When developing new solutions for tackling the climate crisis, innovators in the energy transition often encounter regulatory barriers. In order to resolve the discrepancy between necessary innovations and appropriate legal and regulatory framework conditions, supportive policy measures are required. New approaches such as regulatory experimenting (also called regulatory sandboxes) are becoming increasingly prevalent. We consider regulatory experimenting and regulatory sandboxes to be an instrument that grants exemptions from regulation to trial new solutions (e.g. in the form of pilot or demonstration projects) and/or test new regulation in a real-life context, which require some kind of changes/adaptations/ exemptions from current rules and provisions.

In 2019, the IEA International Smart Grid Action Network (ISGAN) published its Casebook on innovative regulatory approaches with a focus on regulatory sandbox initiatives to speed up energy innovation and smart grid deployment. It aims to provide an international overview of regulatory sandbox instruments and in-depth case studies of planned or implemented programmes in 7 countries (AU, AT, DE, IT, NL, UK, US). The Casebook is available here.

This ISGAN Annex 7 questionnaire in collaboration ETIP SNET continues our work on regulatory experimenting by broadening its scope to countries not previously covered in the casebook as well as aiming to provide inputs for an update of existing case studies with activities and learnings from the past year. This new edition has special interest in the results of the programme, looking for key learnings on the programme execution and changes in the regulation resulting from the experimentation phase.

This survey is structured in 4 parts:
- Introduction
- Programme
- Governance
- Projects

Your participation will be invaluable to the further collation and analysis of innovative regulatory approaches and regulatory experiments for energy system transformation and smart grid deployment.