A major new report from Eurelectric and Accenture, unveiled and discussed during Power Summit 2026 where we are Media Partner, argues that the biggest obstacle of Europe’s industrial electrification is no longer technology or political will, but the fragmented way decisions get made. The study, titled Power Couples: Enhancing Industrial Competitiveness Through Electrification, introduces a model for cross-sector partnerships designed to unlock the scale that isolated projects consistently fail to reach.
The study draws on more than 3,500 market signals across 61 companies, four industry roundtables, and C-suite interviews spanning energy-intensive industries, data centres, and low- to mid-temperature heat sectors. Its central finding is straightforward: electrification works when the surrounding system is aligned, and stalls when it is not.
Partnerships that optimise the whole system
The “Power Couples” concept describes multi-layer partnerships that bring together industrial players, energy providers, technology firms, and capital partners in outcome-driven collaboration. Rather than each actor optimising its own position, a dynamic that inflates costs and delays, Power Couples jointly manage system-level coordination across demand, supply, and infrastructure.
The commercial structures enabling this are already familiar: long-term power purchase agreements, heat-as-a-service, energy-as-a-service, waste-heat offtake arrangements, and blended public-private financing. What is new is the integrated logic connecting them. According to the report, the result is lower upfront capital exposure, faster time to deployment, and clearer accountability for outcomes, for the partners and for the grid.
Who does what
The framework assigns distinct roles to each actor type. Energy-intensive industries anchor large, bankable demand and underwrite PPAs. They justify grid reinforcement and provide long-term offtake certainty. Low- and mid-heat industries contribute flexible electrified heat demand, absorb low-cost renewable power, and make brownfield retrofit packages scalable. Data centres provide stable high-volume power demand alongside fast flexibility through uninterruptible power supply systems, and their recoverable waste heat becomes a system asset rather than a liability. Utilities and grid operators tie the system together through orchestration, flexibility procurement, and infrastructure planning.
The report’s indicative modelling is instructive: coordinating solar and battery energy storage systems across a data centre and a dairy plant raises the combined return on investment from a baseline of 5.9% to 14.9%, with more than half of that uplift coming from shared flexibility and system services, not asset deployment alone.
Why projects stall: four mutually reinforcing bottlenecks
The analysis identifies four structural barriers that do not act independently but compound at the moment of investment decision. Power economics is the first gate: volatile electricity prices and tariff distortions prevent the formation of bankable, long-term cost structures aligned with industrial investment cycles. Grid access is described as the binding constraint, particularly for data centres where speed-to-power and load concentration make infrastructure the primary gating factor. System integration, meaning the embedding of electrification into existing operations under performance and uptime constraints, is the hidden execution risk. And bankability is where all three converge: electrification CapEx competes with core operational projects, while retrofit risk sits on a single balance sheet with uncertain demand and payback.
Policy is identified as a system overlay that shapes all four. Fragmented permitting, inconsistent support frameworks, and unclear timelines push execution risk downstream. The challenge is therefore not to resolve individual issues in isolation, but to address their combined effect to improve bankability and enable projects to scale.
The competitive case, not just the climate case
One of the report’s more pointed arguments is that electrification has moved from a cost premium to a competitive edge. In an era of disrupted hydrocarbon supply chains and structurally high fossil fuel price volatility, shifting industrial demand toward domestically produced electricity offers predictability that imported fuels cannot. The framing is explicitly about competitiveness, with predictable domestic power treated as a competitive input against price shocks, alongside resilience through diversified energy sourcing, and decarbonisation as a structural outcome of system strength rather than a constraint imposed on it.
The report’s headline ambition is that within five years, electrification should become a standard, bankable industrial investment, designed as a system rather than retrofitted as an add-on, with risk distributed across policy, capital, and infrastructure frameworks rather than concentrated on a single project balance sheet.
Immediate actions recommended
The report closes with a set of no-regret moves for each actor. Policymakers are urged to create fast-track frameworks for designated electrification areas with anticipatory grid build-out and parallel permitting. DSOs and TSOs are asked to publish transparent connection, congestion, and flexibility maps. Energy-intensive industries should aggregate future load and flexibility into a single bankable electrification roadmap. Low- and mid-heat sectors are advised to prioritise thermal flexibility before full process conversion. Data centres are encouraged to make every new site flex-ready and waste-heat-ready by design.
