Belectric: European solar developers are in a ‘critical’ position without grid overhaul

The company is celebrating its 25^th anniversary in 2026, but as Blanke says, Belectric’s most successful years seem to be behind it – at least for now. This is not to say it’s still not a major player – “the business started 25 years ago, and a lot of our competitors and partners from the past went bust, and we survived, which is great,” Blanke says, but the heat has been taken out of much of Europe’s solar industry in the last year, and taken business with it.

Solar at its limit

With all of the sector’s technological advances, “one thing we were never able to do is produce solar power during the nighttime,” Blanke says, laughing.

His joke gets at a fundamental point: there are limits on the ability of solar power to generate electricity. Combined with the slow expansion of the grid in much of Europe, which has failed to keep up with the explosion in renewable energy generation post-2022, solar capacity is coming close to its physical limit in some markets.

“While we had a massive boom in renewable generation capacity [after the 2022 energy crisis], we didn’t have the investment in the grid infrastructure to match that,” Moysiadis says.

“If you want to utilise solar power, especially in summer, you need flexibility. Which is batteries,” continues Blanke. However, in the case of home market Germany, he says that “in general”, grid operators are “not really pushing for it and sometimes [are] even reluctant to approve grid connections for batteries.”

Germany’s energy storage market is in a transitional phase, with a switch towards “maturity” as the key criterion for approval. Research from climate think tank Ember from May said that policy drivers will determine the success of the market in the coming years and whether the considerable grid queue and backlog can be built.

The result of the uncertainty over energy storage rollout is stagnation for developers like Belectric, Blanke says. “Currently, we are building no projects in Germany,” he says, which is a significant omission for an industry veteran like Belectric with its roots firmly in Germany’s solar market. He attributes this to negative prices, which are a result of the inability and inflexibility of the grid to cope with high solar output in the summer, and which energy storage can solve.

Faltering energy demand is compounding the issue. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says the EU will not return to 2021 levels of energy demand (when there was a post-COVID bump) until 2028. Moysiadis attributes this to “a lot of the energy-intensive industries…choosing to move because energy in Europe is not competitive enough, and it’s not competitive enough because we haven’t invested enough in the grid. That means that we have the deindustrialisation of Europe.”

Power price paradox

High power prices do deter heavy industry, both in new investments and the wider adoption of electrification. This reduces opportunities for solar development. As well as the lack of grid investment and modernisation pushing up prices, reliance on fossil fuels broadly increases the price of power, particularly during times of crisis and price spikes.

Simultaneously, Blanke told us that the markets with the highest power prices (those also that are heavily reliant on gas), the UK, Italy and Ireland, are still proving fruitful for solar developments. The UK has high power prices due to its reliance on gas and the linkage of electricity to gas prices, and has seen major expansions in its solar capacity through the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme. Italy has introduced a number of supportive auctions for renewables, has a lot of reliable sun, and yet still a lot of expensive gas in its energy mix.

Within this irony – that high power prices are simultaneously hampering Europe’s overall industrial power demand while creating opportunities in certain individual markets – it’s clear to both Blanke and Moysiadis that the continent’s grids are now a major problem.

Slow grid interconnection, long grid queues and delays to overall grid reforms “are a characteristic of Europe”, says Moysiadis. Most major European markets are dealing with tens of gigawatts of projects in the interconnection queue, many of which are speculative and can crowd out others more likely to be realised. Governments have sought ways to ease this congestion, but based on Moysiadis and Blanke’s comments, these measures have yet to be felt by developers.

On top of the factors already discussed, grid delays can “stop dead investment decisions” for projects, he continues, which can force consolidations and “does not help competition over electricity prices for the public.

“That’s a situation we have across Europe,” he says.

‘Caught between worlds’

Resolving the issue will require decisive action from governments, the two say. Grid operators should be “forced to really fulfil the energy transition,” says Blanke. Moysiadis agrees, saying that “it’s about policy…and releasing this situation we have with the grid.”

“The worst-case scenario currently is that we’re not really in a new renewables world, and not in the old conventional world,” Blanke continues, “we’re really stuck in between, which causes more problems.”

Both agree that the sentiment of the industry and its messaging have already turned towards energy security and resilience, away from climate change and sustainability (despite the sweltering, continent-wide heatwave when we spoke in Munich). Now, that imperative needs to be made clear to investors and the public, to create a “new business case” for renewables and a more general overhaul of the energy system.

Moysiadis says that Europe needs “strong regulatory interventions” to accelerate grid connection approvals and create the structural incentive for expanded grid and a deeper energy transition. With faltering demand and huge pressure already on private and public purses, thanks to, among other things, the Iran war, it might take a brave politician to announce an expensive overhaul of energy systems right now.

Moysiadis’ main calls are twofold: give greater ability and responsibility to project investors to develop new grid infrastructure, and decouple electricity and gas prices.

The latter will “win hearts and minds” among consumers, he contends, because there is currently a broad misdirection of blame towards renewable energy for high electricity prices, despite the fact that they offer the lowest raw LCEO of any power source.

The former would involve the “elimination of red tape,” he says. A cliché, but one which he argues would free up private interests to build grid infrastructure “because the business case is there, I’ve got the money, I take the decision.” He claims that a new substation in the UK currently takes five years, whereas a private investor with the right incentives could build it in six months. In theory, this approach could also take some network costs away from the taxpayer, which are currently a tradeoff for renewable energy sources.

Moysiadis goes on to call for a more integrated pan-European grid that can take advantage of different resources in different locations – sun in the south and wind or hydro in the north, for example – and unified grid codes across the continent.

Blanke, his boss, is a touch more reserved in his calls for a political overhaul, but seemingly shares the same frustrations about the pace of change in Europe’s grids, regulations, and commitment to a root-and-branch transformation of energy.

Our conversation with Belectric revealed a company frustrated at the place it finds itself. Europe has made undeniable strides in its energy transition, but pushing past this particular plateau will require deeper change.