Europe faces a massive bottleneck in its transition to clean energy, with hundreds of gigawatts of wind and solar projects currently stalled in administrative lines. Nearly 700 gigawatts of renewable energy are waiting for permission to connect to the power grid across just eight countries, according to the authors of the newly released report.
“Almost 700 GW of renewables are stuck in the grid connection queue across the eight reporting countries, highlighting the continued scale of demand for grid access.” The report adds that in several instances, “the pipeline of committed projects is larger than existing generation capacity.”
This backlog means that the amount of potential new power waiting to be plugged in is far greater than what the current system can handle. In Finland, for example, the volume of requests to generate electricity is 16 times larger than the nation’s entire existing power network. This creates a situation where even viable, approved projects are forced to wait for years because the physical infrastructure—the wires and stations that move electricity—has not kept pace with the rapid growth of new energy sources.
The report “Crossed wires: Grid capacity could block EU energy security” was published by the energy think tank Ember on 1 April 2026. It was prepared by a research team led by Senior Energy Analyst Elisabeth Cremona.
