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Featured in Curtailment creeps – 07-08 – 2026

Making the data center business case

A data center can be built in 18 to 24 months, but connecting it to the grid is another matter, writes Laura Hoffmann-Ostenhof, Europe industry lead at modeling software supplier Gridcog. Across Europe’s established hubs – the FLAP-D cluster of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin – the wait for a grid connection now runs from seven to 10 years, as data centers compete for capacity.
By
Laura Hoffman-Ostenhof
Google’s Saint-Ghislain data center in Belgium uses solar. | Image: Google

The scale is easy to underestimate. The pipeline for data centers in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region is growing more than 40% year on year. FLAP-D available data center capacity has fallen to around 6%, with over 80% of it pre-let before completion. Yet most building is happening outside Europe. BloombergNEF counted …

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