Annual plans are built on assumptions. Power will be available. Permits will clear on schedule. Regulatory frameworks will stabilize. Supply chains will stay manageable. Capital will deploy when committed. Those assumptions weren't unreasonable when most of them were written. Several of them deserve reexamination.

The gap that matters going into the second half of 2026 isn't primarily between strategy and execution. It's between the conditions that existed when plans were written and the conditions that exist now. Organizations executing well against an outdated set of assumptions are still heading in the wrong direction. The question worth asking before July isn't whether the plan is on track. It's whether the assumptions beneath the plan are still true.

The Energy Availability Assumption Has Shifted in Ways Most Models Don't Reflect

Plans written in late 2025 for 2026 energy procurement, facility expansion, and capital investment generally assumed that power would be accessible within a planning horizon that matched the project timeline. That assumption is under pressure across a growing number of markets.

Deloitte's 2026 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook noted that lead times for critical grid equipment such as transformers and switchgear have stretched to multiple years, while equipment and project costs continue to rise. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects roughly 104 gigawatts (GW) of coal and natural gas retirements by 2030, offset by 209 GW of new capacity, though the majority of those additions will be intermittent resources rather than firm dispatchable generation, creating new resource adequacy and planning challenges. PwC's mid-year 2026 Power and Utilities Deals Outlook identified growing concerns that power, labor, and capital constraints could slow portions of the announced data center buildout, even as hyperscaler demand continues to accelerate.

For any organization with facility expansion, data infrastructure, or manufacturing reshoring in its second-half plan, the energy availability assumption deserves a direct review. Not a general acknowledgment that interconnection takes time, but a specific question: does the project timeline assume power availability that the current queue position and regional grid conditions can actually support? If that review hasn't happened, the plan is carrying an assumption that may be disconnected from physical reality.

The Regulatory Stability Assumption Has Fragmented by Jurisdiction

Plans that assumed a degree of regulatory consolidation in 2026 are running into the opposite. On May 29, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed rescinding its climate disclosure rules in their entirety, with a public comment period running through August 3, 2026, and a final vote expected later this year. California's SB 253, requiring large companies to report Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is proceeding with a first-year reporting deadline of August 10, 2026, and is not stayed. SB 261, a related climate financial risk disclosure requirement, remains stayed by the Ninth Circuit pending the resolution of ongoing First Amendment litigation. The EU Omnibus package significantly reduced mandatory Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) scope. The UK's Sustainability Disclosure Requirements continue to advance on a separate timeline.

What this creates is not a simpler environment. It's a jurisdiction-specific one where the compliance obligation depends entirely on where a company operates, which investors hold its debt or equity, and which counterparties set the contract terms. McKinsey's March 2026 Global Survey on economic conditions found that geopolitical instability ranked among the most frequently cited threats to company growth, with energy prices entering the top five domestic risks for the first time in nearly three years. Plans built around a stable regulatory backdrop or unified reporting framework are plans built on a premise that no longer exists.

The Permitting Timeline Assumption Is the Most Consistently Wrong

Of all the assumptions embedded in 2026 plans, permitting timelines may be the most reliably incorrect. Policy shifts and macroeconomic pressures are intensifying cost discipline requirements, with developers prioritizing efficiency across equipment, design, engineering, and labor while accelerating project timelines just to stay viable. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) created a hard deadline for wind and solar projects to begin construction by July 4, 2026, to retain eligibility for PTCs and ITCs under a transition rule. Novogradac's analysis of the OBBBA notes that the obvious takeaway is that wind and solar developers should start construction as soon as feasible on as many projects as possible. That urgency is now colliding with permitting queues that don't move at the pace the deadline requires.

The hoped-for stabilization in trade policy has not arrived, and that companies are modeling scenarios daily with unpredictability requiring constant vigilance. The strongest transactions in 2026 are those not dependent on interest rate cuts, GDP growth, or trade policy resolution. The same logic applies to projects: the ones most likely to execute are those structured to remain viable across a range of timeline scenarios rather than optimized for the base case. A plan that assumes a twelve-month permitting process in a market where eighteen months or longer is increasingly common for major infrastructure and energy projects isn't a conservative plan with upside. It's an optimistic plan with embedded schedule risk.

The Capital Deployment Assumption Has Changed

Many plans assumed capital would move once approved. Increasingly, capital deployment is being gated by infrastructure readiness, permitting milestones, and execution capacity rather than funding availability alone. The distinction matters more in 2026 than it did two years ago because the gap between committed capital and the conditions required to deploy it has widened across multiple sectors simultaneously.

Resilience is now a strategic differentiator, with the most adaptive companies designing for volatility rather than waiting for stability. That reframe applies directly to capital planning. The organizations managing the second half most effectively are those treating capital deployment as a sequencing problem tied to physical and regulatory milestones, not a funding problem tied to availability. Second-half plans that haven't made that distinction will encounter it when projects reach execution and the conditions for deployment aren't there.

What an Assumption Audit Actually Looks Like

The practical question at mid-year isn't whether any of the above is true. Most executive teams know the operating environment has shifted. The question is whether the plans currently being executed against were updated when it shifted, or whether they're still running on assumptions written before the picture changed.

An assumption audit doesn't require rebuilding the plan. It requires identifying, for each major project or initiative in the second-half pipeline, the three or four conditions on which the plan depends, and asking whether those conditions still exist. Power availability at the required scale, on the required timeline. Permitting clearance within the assumed window. Regulatory compliance obligations mapped to the jurisdictions that actually apply. Capital deployment sequenced against approval milestones rather than calendar dates.

Where the answer is yes, the plan is sound. Where the answer is no or uncertain, the plan has an assumption gap. That gap doesn't fix itself in Q3. It surfaces as a variance explanation in Q4, when the options for addressing it are narrower and more expensive than they would have been in June.