How Energy Users Can Form Industrial Clusters to Share Power, Risk, and Grid Connections

As grid queues stretch for years, industrial sites are finding they can go further together than alone; sharing generation, heat and even a single grid connection. This panel brings industrial buyers, TSOs, DSOs and cluster operators together to ask how energy-sharing 'enterprise zones' actually work, and where the grid capacity for Europe's reindustrialisation is going to come from.

• The reindustrialisation paradox: Europe wants new factories, but that needs grid capacity that doesn't exist; with €584bn of grid investment required by 2030, rising to €1.2 trillion by 2040. So where does the connecting capacity come from?
• Policy tailwind: the EU's new 'right to energy sharing' came into force July 2026. Does regulation finally make cluster economics work, or is grid access still the ceiling?
• What TSOs and DSOs actually need: capacity maps show where to build, but the network can't connect everyone. What do operators need industrial users to do differently; flexible connections, complementary load profiles, smarter siting?
• The interconnector bottleneck: cross-border links are how regions balance supply and unlock capacity, yet some like the Netherlands face no new interconnector capacity for 10 years, with around €150bn of interconnector investment needed just for projects starting in the 2030s.