Regulatory and Business Innovation in Uncharted Waters: Mandatory Cold-Ironing

This paper examines how European ports are responding to binding regulations mandating onshore power supply for ships at berth as part of the EU decarbonisation agenda. Drawing on evidence from 11 major ports, we document three recurring business-models: the Standard Intermediary, Active Intermediary, and Facilitator model, respectively. All three are port-led but differ in how ownership, investment responsibility, pricing authority, and coordination tasks are allocated across ports, ship operators, electricity suppliers, and grid operators. These configurations have enabled early, compliance-oriented deployment of CI, but are associated with governance challenges as implementation scales, including concentrated pricing discretion, fragmented responsibility for connection planning and network upgrades, and uneven translation of formal market-opening principles into competitive outcomes in practice. Our typology of business models shows how organisations operationalise regulatory incompleteness throughbundles of roles and revenue rights in capital-intensive infrastructure settings.