The overlooked grid factor shaping Europe’s energy security
Guest/partner contributor
Posted on: 25 March 2026
Gridraven's Georg Rute discusses how Europe’s energy security depends both on electricity generation and how effectively it can move that power across the grid.
A narrow waterway a thousand kilometres away is once again pushing up Europe’s energy bill.
As European leaders gathered in Brussels, calling for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a halt to attacks on water and infrastructure, one thing was clear: Europe’s energy system remains exposed to shocks far beyond its borders.
Europe has spent the past few years reducing its dependence on Russian gas by building liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals. But a fifth of global LNG passes through this fragile global route, and LNG prices are now twice as high as a week ago.
The continent spends roughly €400 billion per year on imported fossil fuels, leaving it vulnerable to price volatility and supply risks it cannot control.
While renewables are Europe’s strategic path to energy independence, the slow build-out of the transmission grid threatens to stall this future. We lose billions every year due to transmission bottlenecks and curtailment, even when demand exists across different parts of the continent.
Europe’s energy security depends not only on how much electricity it can generate, but also on how effectively it can move that power across the grid.
The best solar and wind resources are often far away from cities, in places with historically weak grids. Grid congestion and static transmission limits leave a significant share of renewable energy unused, even when wind conditions would allow them to safely carry more power.
If Europe wants a more secure, independent, and renewables-based energy system, it will need to build a much stronger transmission grid. But the fastest gains will come from optimising the grid it already has.
The domestic energy bottleneck
Domestically produced solar and wind are Europe’s only mature path to more stable prices and long-term energy independence. In fact, increased investments in solar and wind power in countries like Germany and Spain have helped shield the European market from major price shocks resulting from the Iran conflict.
Europe already produces enough renewable electricity to meet demand during many hours of the year. Electricity generation from renewables even surpassed fossil fuels in the EU in 2025. Looking ahead a few years, solar, wind, and storage could supply power at least two-thirds of the time, with the remainder needing to come from coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear.
But renewables introduce a structural challenge: power is generated far from demand centres, from offshore wind in the North Sea to solar in the South, and transmission system operators (TSOs) cannot move enough of it long distances to meet demand.
Much of the continent’s transmission network was built decades ago and was never designed for today’s power flows.
Only a portion of that electricity can move through the grid, creating local oversupply. Regions near solar and wind plants often face negative prices, while demand centres further away experience high prices as a result of more expensive, local generation from fossil fuel power plants.
The grid ultimately determines how much of that energy can actually be used, depending on how much of it can get to where it’s needed.
Europe's transmission grid needs an upgrade
The ability to move power across the grid is becoming a defining factor in Europe’s energy security, but it will require updates and new management practices.
Much of the continent’s transmission network was built decades ago and was never designed for today’s power flows. Many TSOs still operate these networks with outdated management practices, like static limits originally established to prevent lines from overheating but that do not reflect real-time conditions.
A stronger, updated grid could reduce curtailment, balance regional price differences, and usher in a higher share of domestically produced energy across Europe. Of course, building new transmission is an essential piece of this puzzle, and record investments are underway. The problem is, building new transmission is the slowest part of the chain. New lines often take at least ten years to build, and permitting and public acceptance remain stubborn barriers.
The European Commission is pursuing important reforms, like accelerated permitting structures in the Grids Package proposed late last year. But these efforts are still too slow to solve the energy dependence problems we’re facing right now.
More on Europe's energy security:
Live blog: Europe's response to the energy crisis following the Middle East conflict
Energy security must not overshadow affordability in Europe
Flexibility, intelligence and resilience: A path to European energy security
An overlooked opportunity
Optimising the grid is critical for bolstering energy security in the near term. Europe is not only losing clean energy to curtailment, it’s also underutilising the grid itself. Estimates suggest that up to 30 per cent of additional transmission capacity regularly goes unused under typical operating conditions.
Since the early 2010s, utilities have explored sensor-based dynamic line rating (DLR) technologies to try to tap into this unused capacity with flexible limits that adjust to temperature differences in real-time. Unfortunately, many of these early DLR approaches struggled to scale due to the complexity of hardware deployment.
Europe can achieve a secure domestic energy supply, but it is unlikely to return to the extremely low electricity prices of the 2010s.
However, machine learning and software-only techniques are turning the tide for the practical application of DLR technology. Using hyper-local wind forecasting based on public weather data and AI, sensorless DLR models are being used to move more power, faster, and support higher shares of wind and solar in real systems.
Grid operators in Estonia and Finland are already applying this technology across their full networks and seeing significant power gains in a matter of weeks, averaging increases of around 20%.
Every additional megawatt moved across the grid reduces reliance on imported fuels, lowers congestion costs, and strengthens Europe’s energy security.
The realistic mix Europe must accept
A renewables-based Europe depends on a stronger and better-utilised transmission grid. But the system will still need fossil fuels to ride through windless and cloudy periods.
During longer periods without sufficient solar and wind production, domestic natural gas could be used as dispatchable backup. The goal is not to eliminate fossil fuels entirely, but to reduce dependence on imports and use oil, coal and gas strategically.
Europe can achieve a secure domestic energy supply, but it is unlikely to return to the extremely low electricity prices of the 2010s. Ranges at that time were the result of amortised power plants and low carbon prices, and the main concern was that electricity prices were too low to justify investment.
Affordability is important, but the criterion for a successful energy future should not be affordability at the 2010s levels of around 30 euros per megawatt-hour. Any new firm generation capacity nowadays requires about twice to three times more. Europe needs to accept this reality and move on.
Where do we go from here?
Europe can’t control geopolitics. But we can control whether we maximise our existing transmission infrastructure now while we build a stronger grid, which is the foundation for a secure and clean power supply.
Until we do that, EU energy security will remain defined somewhere else.
The real energy security play is already sitting on the grid.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Georg Rute is the CEO of Gridraven, a grid software company that provides dynamic line ratings based on precision weather forecasting available globally. Before Gridraven, Rute founded Sympower, a virtual power plant company, and was the head of smart grid development at Elering, Estonia’s Transmission System Operator.
