Europe’s battle for power spurs evolution of a new ecosystem for energy-hungry firms

The boom in artificial intelligence, a pressing need for more data centers and the energy transition story — particularly in transportation — are all spurring demand for electricity, and the existing power infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

Businesses are facing five to eight-year wait times to connect to Europe’s ageing and strained electricity grids, experts told CNBC, as the emergence of new areas of demand drives an unprecedented rise in permit requests for power. According to the IEA, at least 1,500 gigawatts of global clean energy projects have been stopped or delayed because of a lack of grid connections and about $700 billion of grid investment is needed for countries to meet their green goals.

Data centers, the large facilities that house servers for computing processes and often require huge amounts of power, are the “primary director” of that growing competition to connect to the grid, said Diego Hernandez Diaz, partner at McKinsey.

He told CNBC that clients have quoted wait times of up to eight years to connect to the grid.

“There are certain transmission system operators in Europe, that are already facing two, three or more folks all attempting to interconnect to the same node at the same time. … There is a literal queue within individual connection points to see who gets to connect first,” he explained.

Hernandez, whose work focuses on electro-intensive industries, said that over the last 18 months, nearly all of his work has focused on data centers, a sector that he expects to grow at an annual compound growth rate of 20% over the next six years. Demand for the facilities required to train large language models (LLMs) is expected to continue its exponential increase as tech giants race to dominate in AI.

Energy management firm Schneider Electric warned in a January report that Europe faces a looming power crunch, with three to five-year waiting lists for grid connections in energy-constrained regions.

“It’s kind of a race,” Steven Carlini, chief advocate of AI and data centers at Schneider Electric, told CNBC. “You have all these companies that are trying to deploy as much capacity as they can. But it’s constrained by the number of GPUs [graphics processing units] and the available power and the permitting.”

“We’re going from a situation where you have one application or two applications [to connect to the grid] per year, in some countries, to 1,000,” Carlini said.

It’s not just the amount of investment needed — but also the speed with which it can be deployed — which will be key to addressing the issue, McKinsey’s Diaz said. He also pointed to the growing complexity of the work of high-voltage grid operators and the example of Germany, which needs to go from building 400 kilometers of power lines a year to 2,000 kilometers.

Diaz sees the competition to connect to the grid “either maintaining or intensifying” in 2025.

Jerome Fournier, director of innovation at subsea cable manufacturer Nexans, said his firm has a “huge” order backlog in the range of seven-to-10 billion euros ($7.28 billion-$10.40 billion). Nexans’ cables are used to transmit electricity generated by wind and solar farms, and to supply power to homes and businesses.

“Everybody’s considering: do we still have some room in our plans to manufacture other projects?” he said.

Fournier told CNBC that firms like Nexans should also keep slots available for smaller projects such as interconnections for offshore wind turbines. “You’ve got to have the right balance between the load of the plans, the profitability and this type of electrification,” he said.

Power constraints are leading data center operators to evolve their own “ecosystem of power backup,” according to Schneider Electric’s Carlini.

In the future, data centers are expected to be at the center of that grid ecosystem, particularly if they are able to generate their own power with small modular reactors — mini nuclear reactors that produce electricity.

Battery storage and strategic charging are also becoming increasingly important, Carlini said. These systems allow for the temporary storage of energy from the power grid to provide extra backup.

The CEO of power solutions provider AVK, Ben Pritchard, said some European countries are facing large, 100-megawatt grid connection requests of a size that they’ve never seen before.

He advocates for transition-linked energy solutions such as the use of microgrids, which are a separate islanded power system.

In Norway, they’re trialing flexible connection agreements where customers limit their connection to the grid based on certain conditions, Beatrice Petrovich, senior energy and climate analyst at think tank Ember, highlighted. This allows them to adjust their energy usage depending on how the grid is faring at certain times.

Ember also called for the implementation of rules on what it calls “anticipatory” grid investments. These would allow electricity grid operators to plan in a forward-looking way, taking into account the market trends of key technologies, such as growth in renewables and battery storage, Petrovich explained.

Countries that move forward with improving legislation on enabling firms to have a fully decarbonized energy stack will be the “winner of the race,” putting forward a more “friendly ecosystem” around data centers, AVK’s Pritchard said.

Ultimately, a bottleneck in the grid “encourages people to think differently, and when people are encouraged to think differently, they’re more open to different solutions. That, I think, is teeing up for the market to shift quite significantly,” said Pritchard.

Despite a growing need for power from some new and developing industries, Europe is still lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to growth in power demand. High electricity prices and operational costs are hampering overall demand in the region, leading to a more fragmented market.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) this month hailed the rise of a “new Age of electricity,” as it upped its forecasts for global demand, predicting growth of 3.9% for 2025-2027 — the fastest pace of growth in recent years.

The forecasts for Europe are more modest, however. Following two years of sharp declines in power demand, the region saw an increase of just 1% in 2024, according to a January report from energy think tank Ember.

“2024 marks a turning point for electricity demand,” said Ember’s Petrovich, one of the authors of their report. “What we saw is the first rebound — even if it was a small rebound after many years of decline — it was widespread across the block.”

McKinsey’s Diaz explained that since the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions, electricity prices have settled around 60 to 80 euros per megawatt hour. This is still 50-100% more expensive than prices seen in the previous two decades, however.

As a result, costs for consumers have soared, leading to signs of a deceleration in demand for heat pumps and electric vehicles, he said.

Diaz added that for manufacturers in Europe, the energy requirements “tower above those of any other geography in the world, it’s not only potentially more expensive, but even potentially more challenging,” Hernandez said.

The “unprecedented” growth in data centers is “helping the overall curve ever so slightly, but everything else is fighting against it,” Hernandez said.