A few weeks ago I published an article summarising the interviews carried out at the Future of Utilities Energy Transition summit in Amsterdam in March.  The key themes that stood out from speakers including UK government representatives, the EIB, UN and Climate KIC was that the energy transition had shifted from a climate based imperative to an economic one…..

This weekend’s reading of the latest report from the ‘We Mean Business Coalition really put that imperative into perspective.  The large scale research project talked to business executives across 18 different countries, and the results spoke for themselves.  91% of executives said that electrification was a matter of national security, with 88% suggesting that electrification would make them more competitive.  And critically, 62% said that they’d consider moving their operations across borders if government actions did not support a greater move to electrification.

To industry experts, this is perhaps not a total surprise – geopolitical events have shown that price spikes caused by a dependence on foreign gas makes for economic volatility.  But what we are seeing now is a growing awareness within businesses that energy policy globally is not keeping up.

The challenge here is whether the global infrastructure exists to absorb this increased demand.  Avrille Palha of the EIB was clear in our conversation in Amsterdam - without more than a trillion euros of new grid investment, the physical foundation for the transition does not exist. Europe needs to integrate around one hundred gigawatts of renewable energy every year, connect hundreds of gigawatts of storage and support the rapid electrification of industry and transport. The grid is the bottleneck at every stage.

And this is a pan European problem - Renewable projects totalling 1,700 gigawatts across sixteen European countries were stuck in connection queues in 2024. More than half of the transmission projects needed by 2030 are still awaiting permits according to ENTSO-E. Almost half of the EU’s cross‑border electricity capacity requirements for 2030 remain unresolved. The EU Grids Package, launched in late 2025, attempts to accelerate permitting and mandate cross‑border cost allocation, but several member states have already raised concerns about centralised planning and higher grid fees.

Avrille positioned this not as a technical challenge, but one of sovereignty – the EU cannot be energy independent until the grid itself can run independently of fossil fuels.  Simon Barnham of the UK Government’s Department of Business and Trade made the same point – energy independence is critical for future economic growth, and grid constraints need to be overcome in order to get there.

The Netherlands offers perhaps the most vivid illustration of what happens when corporate electrification intent runs ahead of the infrastructure built to support it. Grid operator Liander reported 27,500 household applications for higher-capacity grid connections in the first five months of 2026 alone, up more than 50% on the same period a year earlier, while Stedin declared parts of Utrecht’s electricity network effectively closed for new capacity for an indefinite period. Some applicants now face waits of up to three years. For businesses the picture is even starker: grid operators Liander and TenneT have warned of wait times of up to ten years for companies seeking new connections or expanded capacity. The Dutch government has been forced to respond – announcing plans for a Crisis Act on Grid Congestion that combines accelerated permitting with new market structures for flexibility, but the language of crisis is telling in a country that has been one of Europe’s transition leaders. Regional operators currently hold 14,044 requests on their waiting lists totalling 9 GW, while TenneT’s national list carries a further 212 requests adding up to 38 GW. The measures announced in February are expected to free up between 5 and 10 GW by 2030; welcome, but a fraction of what is needed.

Germany faces the same structural constraint at a larger scale. Between 2009 and 2024, of 128 high-voltage grid construction projects called for by Germany’s Federal Network Agency, only 34 were fully completed. The consequence is a persistent north-south bottleneck: renewable generation concentrated in the north and offshore, industrial demand concentrated in the west and south, and insufficient transmission capacity connecting them. An estimated 140 GW of renewable energy projects and 130 GW of battery storage projects are currently awaiting a grid connection in Germany. Analysts have described delays in distribution grid connections as blocking investment in key future technologies, adding that the cost of inaction is now twice as high as it would have been before the current energy crisis.

These are not just a few examples. Grid connection queues have reached record levels worldwide, and a lack of grid capacity is emerging as a critical bottleneck in many regions, slowing the deployment of new electricity generation, storage and demand. The IEA’s Electricity 2026 report is clear: the grid is not a secondary consideration for the transition, it is its central constraint. Geopolitical instability is accelerating an existing business shift toward clean electrification, but power systems, grids and policy frameworks are not keeping pace. That sentence, published today by the We Mean Business Coalition alongside the Public First findings, directly echoes the conversations I had in Amsterdam

Maria Mendiluce, the Coalition’s CEO, said in the report’s accompanying statement that businesses are “increasingly seeing electrification as the foundation of future competitiveness, energy security and economic resilience” and that “at a time of geopolitical instability and fossil fuel volatility, companies are not retreating from the transition, they are moving faster toward it.” This is the economic argument that Alberto Oguara of Climate KIC was making in Amsterdam when he characterised the driver behind decarbonisation as ‘economy, economy, economy’- and it is the argument that Simon Banham commented, is now the one most capable of surviving changes of government and winning cross-party political support in ways that environmental arguments have historically struggled to do.

The lack of government action on these issues is identified as the major challenge -  72% of the executives surveyed by Public First say that government policy is lagging behind business intent, with 62% considering moving their operations across borders if government does not provide sufficient support. Capital, as the Amsterdam conversations made clear, will not wait for slow-moving government interventions.

Tim Van Amstel of E.ON One described his organisation’s entire operating model as an attempt to bridge the gap between what the industry says it wants to do and what it actually delivers; Sara Brooks of Kaluza pointed to chronic under-investment by retailers and slow flexibility adoption as the places where the transition is currently losing ground. Both observations highlight the same issue: intent without infrastructure and policy alignment does not translate into delivery.

What the Amsterdam conversations and the We Mean Business Coalition report together suggest is that the energy transition has passed a point of no return, moving from political commitment to the bulldozer of commercial logic. The gas era is not ending because of political intervention but rather when events outside of individual nation states’ control occurred – C-suites across 18 countries started to draw their own conclusions about the real costs of energy dependency.

The question is no longer whether electrification happens. It is whether governments, grid operators, flexibility providers and data platforms can move fast enough to meet a demand signal from business that won’t wait.