WBCSD's Business Breakthrough Barometer, published this year with Bain & Company and the Breakthrough Agenda, found wind and solar curtailment rising in every market it tracked. Brazil's curtailment rate has climbed sharply, with the country's grid operator reporting roughly 20% of wind and solar output curtailed through 2025 and into 2026, up from a small fraction of that just a few years earlier. WBCSD's report cites steep increases in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Spain as well. Most of the global backlog sits in solar and storage, and the mismatch is straightforward. Generation can be permitted and built in a fraction of the time a new transmission line takes to plan and construct.
Grid Planning Still Runs on a Multi-Year Clock
WBCSD notes that grid planning cycles typically run four to five years, while new generation capacity gets added annually at a much faster pace. One industrial technology executive interviewed for the report described customers seeking connections for charging infrastructure only to be told sufficient capacity simply was not available. A steel industry executive named the pace of grid expansion, not the pace of decarbonization technology, as the factor most likely to determine how fast the company's own transition could move. Having generation under development in a region is no guarantee that a specific project can actually secure the connection capacity it needs.
A Few Governments Are Rewriting the Queue Rules
Some system operators have stopped treating connection order as sacred. Denmark's Energinet formally abolished first-come, first-served allocation for large-load connections on February 1, 2026, replacing it with a framework that prioritizes projects closer to construction rather than whichever application arrived first. Germany, Spain, and the UK have moved in similar directions since 2025. France has shifted its peak and off-peak pricing windows to pull electricity consumption toward the hours when generation is cheapest and most abundant, effectively asking demand to meet supply halfway instead of waiting for supply to catch up to demand everywhere at once.
WBCSD's own recommendation goes further than reordering queues. The organization argues for capacity payments, dynamic tariffs, and standardized flexibility markets that let businesses and distributed assets shift consumption toward periods of abundant power, which could let existing network capacity carry more load without waiting years for new lines. Facilities teams in tight markets are already building that kind of optionality into project plans, pairing behind-the-meter generation with grid supply so a single connection delay does not stall an entire project.
For companies planning factories, depots, or data centers, the practical question has changed. It is no longer enough to ask how much renewable electricity a market is building. A power purchase agreement (PPA) signed against a project still sitting in an interconnection queue carries real delivery risk, and grid congestion is increasingly shaping contract terms and site competitiveness on its own, independent of the underlying generation economics. WBCSD's advice to companies is direct: map site-level and logistics load profiles now, identify where demand can flex, and use that information to negotiate connection terms rather than discovering the constraint after capital is already committed.
