The last mile

Europe is pouring money into the wrong end of its power grid. Distribution grids are what stand between households and cheaper energy bills.

In March, Energinet, the operator of the Danish grid, stopped taking new connection requests. So many had piled up that adding new requests made little sense, given that more than 60 gigawatts of demand wanted in, against a country whose entire peak draw in 2024 was 7.3 gigawatts.

Duygu Kutluay, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, a clean energy pressure groups, has been making the same argument for months. “Distribution grids,” she says, are what “stand between households and businesses and cheaper energy bills.” A report her group commissioned from AFRY, a consultancy, and published this month totted up the renewable and storage projects waiting to plug into local networks in eight countries (Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain and Great Britain). The bill for the wait comes to 100 billion euros: some 375 gigawatts of renewables, close to the whole coal and gas fleet Europe wants to shut, and another 455 gigawatts of batteries.

Transmission lines, the motorways that carry power between countries, get the speeches. The local distribution wires that run to the substation and the kettle do not, even though 70 per cent of new renewables are meant to connect to them by 2030. Leonhard Birnbaum, who runs the German utility E.ON, has spoken of the sheer volume bearing down on operators: his firm alone faces incorporating some 5.7 million new connections by 2030. Across Europe there were more than 450,000 requests to connect renewables in 2024, up 133 per cent on 2021. The people meant to process them, the distribution system operators, are mostly regulated monopolies with little reason to build ahead of demand.

Britain shows how brutal the clear-out can get. By late 2025 the national operator, NESO, was sitting on a connections queue of more than 700 gigawatts, ten times what it had been five years earlier, with some projects being told they face a decade’s wait. In December 153 gigawatts of battery projects were stripped of their place in line. Solar Energy UK, a trade body, called the reforms “painful but necessary.”

Waiting is not free. When clean power cannot get onto the grid it is curtailed, switched off while a gas plant is paid to fill the gap. The Bundesnetzagentur, Germany’s network regulator, reported in April 2025 that solar curtailment there had almost doubled in 2024, to 1,389 gigawatt-hours, as panels went up faster than the wires could carry their output; managing the congestion cost some 2.7 billion euros. Across seven countries, Ember, a think-tank, reckons 7.2 billion euros of clean electricity was thrown away in 2024 alone, the generators paid anyway and the bill passed to customers. Every project stuck in the queue also keeps a gas plant in the mix that might otherwise have closed.

Down the wires

Brussels has taken note of the problem, up to a point. Dan Jorgensen, the European Union’s energy commissioner, launched the bloc’s Grids Package in December, a 1.2 trillion euros plan to speed up planning, permitting and investment. Most of its weight, though, sits on transmission, the long-distance lines, rather than the local ones where the queues are worst. The Commission’s own figures show just how much of a mismatch there is, however. By 2040 it expects distribution networks to need about 730 billion euros of investment, against 477 billion euros for transmission. Poland has gone furthest in the other direction, rewriting its market rules so that batteries and flexible demand can earn money by helping balance the system. The European Parliament and the Council will spend much of this year haggling over the package, with Germany and Italy wary of Brussels redrawing national rules too often.

Chiara Natalicchio, a senior consultant at AFRY who worked on the report, frames the lesson plainly: a new gigawatt, she says, is worth only as much as the network can “connect, move and balance.” Energinet’s queue has still not reopened.

Photo: Dreamstime.

The last mile was originally published on Emerging Europe.

المصدر: Emerging Europe