Milan TAR Declares ARERA Resolution on Dispatching for Internal User Networks Null

Parola Associati represented a group of major energy-intensive industrial operators in appeals before the Milan Regional Administrative Court. The Milan TAR, in two judgments delivered and filed on 1 December 2025, upheld the appeals and declared null ARERA Resolution 329/2022/R/eel concerning the regulation of the dispatching service for Internal User Networks (RIU). The court found that the challenged resolution circumvented the obligation to conform to the res judicata established by earlier decisions of the TAR of Lombardy in 2020, which were confirmed by the Council of State in 2021. The judgments emphasize that RIU users cannot be equated with users directly connected to the public grid for the purposes of determining Terna's dispatching charges. RIU arrangements provide predominantly internal balancing and resort to the public network's dispatching only for residual energy, producing a substantially lower impact on the costs of the service managed by Terna. Relying on the Court of Justice of the European Union's jurisprudence and the principle of cost-reflectivity, the TAR held that dispatching regulation must be structured to reflect the actual costs incurred by the users concerned. In the absence of a technical inquiry demonstrating costs analogous to ordinary users, the Authority cannot apply uniform tariff criteria to RIU. The court concluded that Resolution 329/2022 reproduced a regime "substantially identical" to the one already annulled, amounting to an elusion of the earlier judgments, and ordered ARERA to fully redefine the matter on the basis of adequate technical evaluations consistent with the specific characteristics of RIU. "The rulings reaffirm an essential principle that, as res judicata, cannot be disregarded: cost discipline must reflect the actual volume of energy exchanged with the public grid," said lawyer Andrea Leonforte, highlighting the importance of this element for legal certainty and the competitiveness of enterprises operating complex private network configurations. Parola Associati represented the clients with a team composed by: Andrea Leonforte and Silvia Pellegrino, practising in administrative and energy regulatory law.

Milan TAR Declares ARERA Resolution on Dispatching for Internal User Networks Null

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