Filed under market.
The pressure behind the queues is not going away. The International Energy Agency expects electricity demand from the world’s data centers to more than double between 2024 and 2030, from around 415 TWh to roughly 945 TWh, and every terawatt-hour of it arrives somewhere as a connection application.
For most of the last decade such an application was effectively free to make. It cost little, held a position indefinitely, and could be sold on with the company that held it, or quietly abandoned. The consequence was predictable: queues filled with projects that were never going to be built, and genuine demand waited behind them.
Reform changes the economics of that. Where readiness milestones are attached to queue position, holding a slot starts to require evidence: land control, a planning application, a credible program. Speculative applications become expensive to maintain and cheap to lose.
For developers who have done the underlying work this is straightforwardly good news. For those whose portfolio is mostly applications, it is an unwelcome audit. The practical advice is plain: get land control documented, get planning submitted, and be able to show a program that a network operator can believe.
