Build the market, not just the factories.

"Europe's power equipment shortage is real. Treating it as a factory problem alone is what keeps funded projects waiting four+ years for equipment. Our blueprint sets out why, and what it would take to fix."

Shilpika ‘Shilps’ Gautam, Opna’s Founder and CEO

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The status quo no longer works

Europe is queueing for power it can't reach.

New demand is landing all at once. Data centres, renewables, EVs, industrials, and a heating planet, all pulling on the same grid. The equipment that connects them, transformers, cables, switchgear, can't keep pace. Prices are up 77% since 2019. The shortage is real. The headline numbers describe it well. They just don't tell you how to close it.

If we want to embrace the exponential market growth anticipated from AI and data centres, we also have to plan how we will deliver the plant required to power them. New supply chain business models are critical. Doing what we have always done will be completely futile.

Bridgit Hartland-Johnson
Board Director and energy system integration expert; formerly Chief Specialist, Project Development System Integration at Ørsted.

The fix is a new market layer

More factories are coming. They won't be enough on their own.

Building new capacity helps, and Europe needs every factory it can get. But much of that equipment is four to seven years out, and new production lines look set to fill on the same terms as the old ones: sold years ahead to the buyers who've always had first call on the order books. Meanwhile qualified supply already exists. This is a coordination failure: a market with no infrastructure to match supply to the demand that needs it.

Without data, it is almost impossible to create competitive markets, tackle policy barriers, design support schemes, or even explain new products to customers. . . Better data access will lower costs and accelerate project delivery.

Dr. Pawel Czyzak
Europe Director at Ember and Founder at enersite.

Connecting demand to verified supply

Whoever builds the market first owns the decade.

The fix is market infrastructure: verification, matching, and financing in one place, on the same data, sitting as the neutral route between supply and demand. Buyers find qualified slots, finance the deposits, and move them when projects slip. OEM order books stay full. Financiers get the data to underwrite supply risk for the first time. The equipment exists. The manufacturers exist. The capital exists. What's missing is the layer that connects them. The blueprint sets out the four coordination failures holding the market back, and what it would

take to fix each one.