Power Couples:
enhancing industrial competitiveness through electrification
OUR MISSION
Eurelectric’s commitment to industrial electrification
The technologies to electrify are ready yet the window to act competitively is narrowing. What stands between ambition and deployment is not innovation, but system alignment.
Across 3,500 market signals, 61 companies and 30 documented projects, one finding is consistent: electrification succeeds where system conditions align, and stalls where they don’t. The solution is not more technology, it is a new class of integrated, outcome-driven partnerships that jointly optimise industrial demand, low-carbon supply and infrastructure: Power Couples.
Europe’s industries are under growing pressure: volatile energy prices, global competition and the race to decarbonise are reshaping how companies invest and operate.
Electrification offers a way forward. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity can improve energy security, reduce emissions and create more stable long-term operating costs. But while the technologies already exist, they are not scaling at the needed pace.
Eurelectric has made industrial decarbonisation a top priority of its 2025-2027 Presidency Manifesto. The Antwerp Dialogue and its joint policy recommendations were a first step in this direction. Now, building on the 2025 report The New Industrial Age, this study moves the question from “Should Europe electrify?” to “How does it scale in practice?” – providing cross-sector evidence on where projects succeed, where they stall, and what makes the difference at scale.
“Turning fragmented decisions into coordinated, system-level delivery is the key to solve the full electrification deployment challenge. Europe now needs investment predictability, faster grid build-out and integrated delivery models that can scale quickly. This will unlock a more resilient, competitive and investment-ready industrial economy.”
– Markus Rauramo, President of Eurelectric and CEO of Fortum
“Electrification is a cornerstone of Europe’s industrial competitiveness and energy transition. To unlock its potential, we need a more integrated approach that connects market design, infrastructure and investment frameworks. When these dimensions are aligned early, electrification becomes not only technically feasible but economically compelling, paving the way for scalable, replicable and cost-effective projects across Europe.”
– Catherine MacGregor, Vice-President of Eurelectric and CEO of ENGIE
+1 pp
Industrial electrification rate increase in Europe in 2024 – far below the pace needed.
72%
EU power mix already decarbonised. The clean electricity offer exists; the offtake must catch up.
-20%
Wholesale electricity price drop in 2024, yet structural gap against competing regions persists.
5-10 yr
Typical grid delivery timeline — versus 2–3 years for industrial investment decisions.
CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES
Electrification is Europe’s strategic lever
Europe’s industrial base is at a critical inflection point. Electrification enables a shift from imported fossil fuels to domestically produced, clean electricity – improving cost stability, resilience, and climate performance. Securing access to clean power is now a strategic imperative for Europe’s industrial base.
Yet, progress remains too slow. Despite a power mix already 72% decarbonised, industrial electrification increased by just one percentage point in 2024 as shown in Power Barometer 2025. The constraint is not technology. It is the system’s ability to turn proven solutions into investable outcomes — rapidly enough to matter.
For the first time, the political and economic case for faster electrification is also converging. The European Commission’s AccelerateEU package aims at making electricity cheaper and more widely available, mirroring the system alignment challenge this report addresses. The signal is clear, and the question is whether Europe’s industrial actors and infrastructure can respond at pace.
METHODOLOGY
One system reality, three industrial frontiers
To understand what is really slowing industrial electrification, Eurelectric brought together utilities, industrial companies, technology providers and policymakers across three very different sectors:
1
Low-/mid-heat sectors
Food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, pulp and paper — industries with continuous 100–200°C steam demand — represent Europe’s most immediately deployable electrification opportunity. Industrial heat pumps and electric boilers are proven and available. Yet many projects remain too small or fragmented to attract investment.
2
Energy-intensive industries
Heavy industries such as steel and cement face a different challenge: the scale of investment required is large, the technology is often being deployed at industrial scale for the first time, and any cost increase risks pushing production and emissions to regions with lower standards. Long-term power contracts and public de-risking are essential before final investment decisions can be made.
3
Data centres
Data centres are becoming one of Europe’s fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, putting increasing pressure on the electric grid, but also creating new opportunities through flexibility and utility-scale waste heat recovery. As interactive data centres demonstrate, these assets can actively support grid stability rather than simply drawing from it.
The industrial landscape studied
Low-/mid-heat sectors
Proven technologies, fragmented project pipelines and immediate deployment potential.
Energy-intensive industries
Large investment scale, operational risk and major infrastructure needs.
Data centres
Fast-growing electricity demand with flexibility and heat recovery opportunities.
Evidence base
3,500+ signals, 61 companies and 30 documented projects.
Evidence for this study was built through three complementary layers: desktop research using AI-assisted sentiment analysis across 61 companies; four cross-sector roundtables with industry leaders, utilities and policymakers; and 24 executive interviews providing direct insight into investment decisions and execution constraints.
BARRIERS
Electrification is not constrained by ambition: it is constrained by execution
Despite the differences, one common pattern emerged: electrification progresses when system conditions are aligned and stalls when they are not. Electrification will scale only when these conditions reinforce each other.
01
Power economics: the first investment gate
Price volatility, limited forward visibility and tariff distortions prevent the formation of bankable, long-term cost structures aligned with industrial investment cycles. Technically viable projects fail to reach Final Investment Decision (FID) because electricity cannot be reliably contracted at stable, competitive long-term prices across most European markets. Electricity price uncertainty is the single most recurrent barrier across all sectors covered in this report. Without price visibility, grid investment and capital mobilisation are slow regardless of intent. This constraint is universal, but most acute in energy-intensive industries, where investment cycles are longest.
02
Grid access and delivery: the binding constraint
A structural mismatch between industrial timelines (2-3 years) and grid delivery timelines (5-10 years) has become a critical bottleneck. Connection queues, local capacity limits and fragmented permitting across site, grid and generation delay access to power. Projects are not lost for lack of ambition – they are lost because infrastructure arrives after the investment window has closed. Grid access increasingly determines siting decisions and capital flows across all three sectors studied.
For data centres in particular, this is the primary gating factor: digital infrastructure scales in years, while electric grid connections still take a decade.
03
System integration: the hidden execution risk
Electrification must be integrated into existing operations under strict performance and uptime constraints. Retrofit complexity, process redesign and embedded flexibility (i.e. load shifting, thermal storage, hybrid operation) increase execution risk when treated as downstream add-ons rather than core design parameters. Projects that embed system integration from the earliest design phase are consistently more energy efficient and outperform those that treat it as an afterthought.
04
Bankability: what’s impacted by other bottlenecks
Electrification capex competes with core operational investment under strict Return on Investment (ROI) thresholds, while First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) and retrofit risks sit on a single balance sheet with uncertain demand and payback profiles. The gap between technical feasibility and investment-grade projects remains persistent. This is a risk allocation gap: projects that fail on bankability almost never fail on engineering viability. This gap is most persistent where capital intensity and retrofit complexity combine with uncertain long-term power costs.
Policy: the system overlay
Policy shapes how all four barriers interact in practice. Fragmented permitting, inconsistent support mechanisms and unclear long-term frameworks push execution risk downstream — making coordinated, timely delivery the critical constraint. The Commission’s AccelerateEU package and Affordable Energy Action Plan signal recognition of this urgency. But signal alone is insufficient: execution-focused policy that aligns infrastructure delivery, permitting and long-term contracting is what the system requires.
THE POWER COUPLES FRAMEWORK
Power Couples: a model for scale
These results show that competing for access to power is not a viable strategy for European industry. Instead, Europe needs to coordinate and build Power Couples: integrated industrial partnerships that coordinate how electricity is produced, consumed and balanced, while also sharing infrastructure and risks.
In a Power Couples model, different stakeholders play complementary roles: one provides stable, long-term demand that supports investment in clean energy, another adjusts its consumption when electricity prices are high, and a third helps balance the grid by responding quickly to fluctuations. Together, they optimise both supply and demand while sharing the benefits of the system. Power Couples do this through commercial structures such as long-term power purchase agreements, heat-as-a-service, waste-heat offtake agreements and blended public-private financing, converting volatile cost exposures into predictable, bankable outcomes for all partners.
The advantage then goes far beyond reducing emissions: for industry, this approach can deliver a cheaper, faster-to-build and more competitive electricity system, ultimately improving the economic returns on investments in electrification.
How Power Couples are structured:
In practice:
1
One load anchors long-term clean power
2
Another shifts demand when prices spike
3
A third provides fast balancing
4
All of them share infrastructure, risk and system value
The prize is not only decarbonisation. It is a more competitive electricity system.
A coordinated data centre and dairy plant in Poland illustrates the financial case: standalone operation yields a 5.9% return on investment, while full Power Couples coordination reaches 14.9%, with more than half the uplift coming from coordination itself, not additional hardware.
REPLICABLE MODELS
Five replicable blueprints already operating as Power Couples in practice across a wide range of sectors and geographies
E.ON · Silvertown ECTOgrid · United Kingdom
The Silvertown ECTOgrid project shows how industrial electrification can work at urban scale. By integrating large-scale heat pumps, energy storage and smart grid controls, E.ON delivers low-carbon heating and cooling to thousands of homes and businesses. Long-term demand certainty, utility-scale investment and shared risk make it not just technically viable, but commercially bankable.
Microsoft · EirGrid · Enel X · Dublin, Ireland
The Microsoft Dublin initiative shows what becomes possible when a data centre actively participates in the energy system rather than passively consuming electricity. By repurposing existing backup infrastructure for fast grid response, the partners have built a model that improves system integration, generates ancillary services revenue and reduces operational costs, all with near-zero additional capital.
Stockholm Exergi · Stockholm Data Parks · Sweden
Stockholm Data Parks demonstrates how waste heat from data centres can become a tradable thermal energy asset fed directly into a city’s district heating network.
Under long-term contracts, operators convert a cooling cost into a revenue stream while the city cuts its dependence on natural gas for industrial heating. With 30+ data centres connected, it is one of Europe’s most advanced examples of utility-scale heat recovery.
Heineken · EDP · Rondo · Vialonga, Portugal
The Heineken Vialonga project shows how industrial heating can be fully decarbonised with no process changes and no upfront capital. Under a Heat-as-a-Service model, EDP delivers zero-carbon steam from on-site solar and a clean energy PPA, eliminating natural gas boilers and reducing energy consumption.
Wienerberger · GreenBricks · Austria
By replacing gas-fired kilns with electric alternatives powered by clean energy and integrating industrial heat pumps with on-site renewables, Wienerberger achieved a 90% reduction in CO₂ emissions and a 30% cut in energy consumption — with a public-private structure to de-risk the investment.
Select a blueprint to explore it in full:
What makes a blueprint replicable?
Across all cases, five conditions consistently distinguish projects that can be replicated from those that cannot:
01
Energy design is embedded into the business case, not layered on top.
02
Infrastructure and spatial dependencies are resolved early, not discovered during execution.
03
Value is created beyond the site boundary, for the wider energy system.
04
Risk is distributed across multiple parties rather than concentrated on the first mover.
05
Solutions are designed for operational fit, integrated into existing throughput and reliability requirements.
These cases prove that the model works when price visibility, grid readiness, flexibility, and risk-sharing align upfront.
CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS
Conclusions and policy recommendations
Scaling industrial electrification requires system-level action, not isolated optimisations. The Power Couples model acts as a facilitator: coordinating industrial players, energy providers and capital partners into integrated delivery. The report’s findings point to three mutually reinforcing sets of immediate actions:
1. Shape the system - policymakers & grid operators
Policymakers and grid operators must fast-track electrification areas covering both new and existing investments, with anticipatory grid build-out and parallel permitting. They must also provide transparent connection, congestion and flexibility maps to guide capital allocation. This removes the primary bottleneck — the misalignment between infrastructure readiness and investment timing — and signals where capital should flow first.
2. Orchestrate system delivery - utilities
Utilities must expand the accessibility of products combining power, heat and storage into tailored propositions for industrial use cases within market boundaries. They should engage in piloting the Power Couples concept through outcome-driven partnerships that jointly optimise load, supply and infrastructure. This reinforces customer-centric energy solutions, unlocks new value streams and preserves transparent cost allocation and investment signals.
3. Activate demand at scale - industry & data centres
Industrial players and data centres must aggregate demand and flexibility to support long-term bankable structures coordinated across actors. New sites should be designed for electrification flexibility in thermal storage, hybrid systems and flex- and waste-heat-ready configurations. This strengthens business cases, reduces price exposure and converts fragmented demand into investable, scalable opportunities.
Coordinated action today creates the competitive energy system of tomorrow – and determines who leads it.
These actions are mutually reinforcing. Together, they can create the competitive, resilient, and decarbonised energy system that underpins Europe’s future prosperity.
“The electrification projects that succeed are those where infrastructure, power economics, operations, and capital are aligned early around a shared outcome. Scaling this across Europe will require collaborative delivery models bringing together industrial players, utilities, technology, and capital partners — while adapting to the specific realities of each market, region, and industrial ecosystem.”
– Andrea Falciai, EMEA Utilities Industry lead at Accenture
Want to explore the full findings, case studies and methodology?
Interested in shaping Europe’s energy future with us? Reach out to our team to join Eurelectric’s business network at business@eurelectric.org.