Europe has set the political framework for the energy transition. Now, its success will be determined by industrial execution. This is exactly where the Handelsblatt Energy Summit comes in: it focuses on the energy transition as Europe’s largest industrial implementation program.
In the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, Matthias Baum and Dominik Eckstein, Associate Partner at Porsche Consulting, report on growing bottlenecks along the energy industry value chain. The rapidly rising demand for transformers, HVDC converters, cables, and switchgear is colliding with limited production capacities and lead times that can stretch over several years.
The key takeaway: the bottleneck is not capital, but industrial capacity. To meet the 2030 targets, the industry must multiply its production output. This requires a fundamental system shift – away from project-driven one-off manufacturing and toward productization and industrialization. Standardized modules, clearly defined interfaces, and end‑to‑end processes enable scalability, planning reliability, and resilience without tying up additional resources. Productization extends beyond hardware to include processes, data, and approval frameworks. Industrialization applies this approach to manufacturing, supply chain, and project execution, with the aim of realizing energy infrastructure industrially rather than as prototypes. The focus is on how to achieve industrial excellence, scale, and security of supply simultaneously – and what the energy sector can learn from other industries.
The article makes one thing clear: the energy transition is Europe’s largest industrial transformation program. Its success won’t be decided by individual projects, but by the ability to systematically manage complexity – through product logic, industrialization, and new forms of collaboration.
Read the full article in the Handelsblatt Journal (issue: January 2026, pp. 22–23, German only).