Transposing the EU hydrogen Directive 2024/1788 in Latvia: how much is already built
Latvia must transpose Directive (EU) 2024/1788 by 5 August 2026, and the instinct is to treat it as a standing start. A closer look at the Enerģētikas likums, the unbundled gas market and the biomethane framework shows how much of the scaffolding already exists — and where the real work still sits.
POLICYNEWS
HydrogenLatvia
7/22/20265 min read
The deadline is not in doubt. Latvia must transpose Directive (EU) 2024/1788 — the common rules for the internal hydrogen and decarbonised gas market — into national law by 5 August 2026. What's worth examining more carefully is a question the deadline alone doesn't answer: how much does Latvia actually have to build?
The reflexive assumption is that hydrogen regulation starts from a blank page. For the gas market it decarbonises, it doesn't. Latvia has spent the better part of a decade assembling exactly the kind of market architecture this Directive asks member states to extend to hydrogen. The interesting analysis isn't whether Latvia is behind — it's mapping what already fits and isolating what genuinely doesn't.
Two instruments, one of which needs transposing
The package is a pair. Regulation (EU) 2024/1789 is directly applicable and has been binding in Latvia since 5 February 2025 — no national law required, it simply governs. Directive (EU) 2024/1788 is the half that each country writes into its own statute book, and 5 August 2026 is its deadline. When we talk about a Latvian transposition, this Directive is the whole of what's in play; the Regulation already applies regardless.
A directive fixes the result and leaves the method to the member state. So the question for Latvia is genuinely open in form: a standalone hydrogen law, as Lithuania has just chosen, or an extension of the existing energy statute. Both satisfy the obligation. The choice tells you something about how a country organises its energy law.
What the Directive requires a country to have in place
Strip the package to its load-bearing elements and the substantive result a national framework must deliver is recognisable:
Unbundling. Hydrogen network operators legally and functionally separated from production and supply, with distinct rules for transmission and distribution.
Third-party access. Non-discriminatory access to hydrogen networks on published terms.
Licensing and permitting. Clear market-entry conditions for hydrogen undertakings.
Regulated tariffs. Including tariff discounts and incentives to help an emerging hydrogen market integrate.
Network planning. Ten-year development planning, with repurposing of obsolete gas networks as the first-choice route and gas permits extended to cover hydrogen.
Consumer rights. The supplier-choice, switching and protection architecture carried over from gas.
Read that list against the Latvian gas market rather than against a blank page, and something becomes clear.
What Latvia already has on the books
Four pillars the Directive leans on are already standing in the Latvian gas market:
Unbundling — done to the maximum, not the minimum. When the gas market opened on 3 April 2017, the legislator chose full ownership unbundling of the single transmission and storage operator. Latvijas Gāze was split: transmission and storage went to Conexus Baltic Grid, distribution to Gaso, trade stayed with the incumbent. Conexus was certified as independent in 2018, and the regulator re-confirms that independence annually. The muscle for separating networks from supply already exists — built to a stricter standard than the Directive demands.
A licensing and tariff regulator. The Public Utilities Commission — SPRK — already issues licences for natural gas transmission, distribution and storage, with a 30-day decision window, and already sets the tariffs. A licensing and tariff authority for a networked energy vector isn't something Latvia needs to invent; it needs to be given hydrogen as an additional object.
Renewable gas already inside the Enerģētikas likums. Hydrogen's conceptual neighbour is already there. Section 117 addresses biomethane and gas from renewable sources, Conexus issues guarantees of origin, and in July 2025 Latvia opened its first public biomethane injection point at Džūkste, with further points at Ragana and Rēzekne greenlit in 2026. A "virtual pipeline" concept already moves renewable gas by truck to grid entry points.
Real storage. Inčukalns is the only underground gas storage in the Baltic region — an aquifer facility with roughly 2.3 billion cubic metres of working capacity and a strategic regional role. The Directive's storage provisions and repurposing-first instinct land in a country that has large-scale storage to reason about, not a hypothetical one.
The fit: why integration suits Latvia
This is where the form question resolves almost on its own. Latvia's energy law has always been a single master statute — the Enerģētikas likums houses electricity, heat and natural gas, and now renewable gas, under one roof. Adding hydrogen as a further regulated vector is architecturally consistent with how Latvia has always written energy law. The natural Latvian path is the integration route: extend the existing licensing, access, unbundling and tariff machinery to hydrogen, rather than stand up a separate Hydrogen Law beside it.
That's a real divergence from Lithuania's choice, and it isn't a value judgment in either direction. A standalone law is more visible and can be cleaner to draft around a new sector. An integration amendment is faster to reason about when the surrounding scaffolding already exists — which, in Latvia's case, it conspicuously does.
Where the fit is easy, and where it genuinely is not
The honest version separates the two. The easy part is institutional: Latvia has the unbundled-operator model, the licensing authority, the tariff-setting practice, the guarantees-of-origin system and the storage asset. Extending scope to a new molecule is incremental work for bodies that already do this for gas.
The harder part is the hydrogen-specific substance that has no gas analogue to inherit:
Who is designated as the hydrogen network operator, and on what timeline, in a country with essentially no hydrogen transmission network to operate yet.
How the Directive's distinction between hydrogen transmission and distribution is drawn in a market that is, today, a handful of pilot-scale projects.
Which of the Directive's exemptions Latvia takes up — the carve-outs for small networks and geographically confined systems are precisely the ones a small market should examine closely rather than skip.
These aren't copy-across questions. They require deliberate national choices.
The unbundling derogation, in Latvia's particular case
One provision deserves a specific read for Latvia. The Directive grants Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania an automatic derogation from horizontal unbundling of hydrogen transmission network operators, running until 2031, on grounds of remote location and small market size. For most small markets that's a meaningful relief. For Latvia specifically it's almost redundant on the gas side — this is a country that already ownership-unbundled its gas operator years ago, well beyond what the concession asks. But hydrogen is a separate designation, and the derogation is still a lever to pick up or leave deliberately when the framework is written. Left on the table by default, it simply lapses.
The gap that structural readiness does not close
None of this should be read as "Latvia is fine." Structural readiness and legislative completion are different things, and the second is the one the Commission counts. Nothing in the publicly available material we reviewed shows a Latvian draft transposing 2024/1788 in progress, and the Climate and Energy Ministry's stated 2026 priorities don't name a hydrogen framework. That's an observation about visibility, not proof of inaction — legislative work in interinstitutional coordination can be entirely real without surfacing. But the precedent sits close: Latvia was several years late transposing the renewable energy directive, under Commission infringement proceedings, and the transposing amendments only took effect in July 2024.
The point of laying out how much already fits is not reassurance. It's the opposite. A country this structurally ready has fewer excuses for arriving late — the hard scaffolding is standing, and what remains is largely a drafting and designation exercise on top of it.
What to watch between now and August
Three markers:
Whether a transposing draft appears on the Cabinet's legislative portal in the coming weeks.
Whether hydrogen enters through amendments to the Enerģētikas likums — the architecturally natural route — or as a standalone act.
Which exemptions and derogations, the 2031 unbundling relief among them, are taken up as deliberate choices rather than allowed to pass by omission.
For Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders, those three signals will say more about the real shape of the market than the deadline itself does.