Regulatory Experiments and Incentive Regulation – Experiences with the SINTEG-regulation

With the increasing decentralization and digitalization of the power supply, the need for innovation in the regulatory framework to adapt the institutional framework to the changing requirements is also increasing. The SINTEG regulation and analogous approaches for regulatory sandboxes were a step in this direction, but their implementation still leads to key obstacles to regulatory innovation. In particular, the limited scope of application, the administrative burden and the lack of incentives for participants were identified in expert interviews as central weaknesses of the current regulatory experiments based on the SINTEG regulation. Therefore, in this article, we propose two approaches with the experimental budget and the application of Regulatory Innovation Trials (RIT) to further develop existing concepts for regulatory experiments and to enable innovations within the regulatory framework (e.g. the inventive regulation of network operators).