Thirty-three gigawatts of industrial demand are waiting in the queue for France’s transmission network—equivalent to three times the current electricity consumption of the entire national industry. RTE has learned from the congestion: starting in 2025, RTE’s procedure strengthened project maturity monitoring; general priority for the most ready projects was announced for end of 2026. The result is logical, and its bias is predictable: very high-power projects can benefit from accelerated procedures under conditions, while diffuse reindustrialization projects are affected by the allocation mechanism.
The Essentials
- More than 200 industrial projects representing nearly 33 GW of new electricity demand are waiting for connection to France’s transmission network, according to the RTE update “Succeeding in France’s Electrification” published on July 3, 2026.
- Since summer 2025, the procedure requires monitoring and maturity requirements; general prioritization of the most ready projects was announced for end of 2026, a criterion linked to the financial and administrative capacity of the project sponsor.
- The Netherlands faces the same dilemma: massive projects waiting for insufficient operational capacity, a sign that the bottleneck is structural across Europe.
- The rule aims to reduce non-credible capacity reservations and prioritize mature projects; its distributive effect on access is not established by available sources.
- The question posed to RTE, and to its European equivalents, is whether access conditions to the network can be designed without reproducing the advantages of the most capitalized players.
33 GW Waiting: The Scale of a Bottleneck
These 33 GW represent a power level comparable to that of France’s entire operating nuclear fleet. The 200 projects in question have filed applications, mobilized teams, and engaged in studies; several have partial financing. All are waiting for a signal from RTE to proceed.
The bottleneck operates through simple mechanics. Decarbonizing industry requires electricity to replace gas and oil. Data centers, driven by artificial intelligence demand, require massive volumes. Green hydrogen projects, battery factories, intensive recycling sites: all arrive at the same time on a network whose capacities are being built at a different pace. RTE plans to triple its annual investment pace by 2030, with 8 billion euros per year specifically dedicated to electrifying uses, according to Review-Energy.
This figure, roughly 1,600 euros per inhabitant spread over five years, tells the scale of the catch-up, but also its limits: this investment must accompany processing a significant capacity demand.
The old first-come, first-served rule aggravated the problem. The previous framework could allow capacity reservation for projects without proven prospects of implementation, making real demand assessment difficult. RTE had to manage a list where a substantial number of projects was not truly ready to connect.
The Maturity Rule: Real Progress with Structural Bias
The structural bias also operates over time. A project sponsor who anticipates probable exclusion from the maturity queue does not engage in the study expenditures that would allow them to access it. The discouragement effect precedes the exclusion effect, meaning the rule filters more diffuse projects than it formally excludes. The queue thus appears less discriminatory than it actually is, since part of the potential demand withdraws before even declaring itself.
The shift in August 2025 is, technically speaking, a clear step forward. Maturity criteria aim to limit capacity reservation by projects without proven prospects and concentrate network capacity on projects that can actually connect within the timeframe. The operator stops managing fiction and begins managing reality.
But maturity also reflects the financial and administrative capacity of the project sponsor. Project sponsors with substantial resources have structural advantages in meeting these criteria compared to sponsors of modest-sized projects in economic conversion basins.
Economist Dani Rodrik, in his most recent work on shared prosperity, identifies precisely this trap. In Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World, he defends conditional industrial policy where the state acts as arbiter of access to collective resources—network, land, public financing—rather than as direct producer. But he warns that this conditionality, if poorly calibrated, reproduces the advantages of already-established actors instead of correcting them. RTE’s maturity criterion illustrates the mechanism: it is rational for the network operator, and it is biased for industrial geography.
The Netherlands as Mirror
The Dutch situation is not an exotic warning. With massive projects waiting for insufficient operational capacity, the Netherlands shows what the queue becomes when the network saturates and allocation falls under a prioritization framework defined by the ACM.
Comparison with France is useful because it isolates the institutional variable. Both countries face demand exceeding short-term absorption capacity. The difference lies in the rules of the game: who decides, by what criteria, with what transparency. The Netherlands suffered congestion without clear rules; France chose a rule. The question is whether this rule is the right one, or whether it is merely preferable to the previous chaos.
The Dutch storage problem—15 GW waiting for projects that themselves condition renewable integration into the network—points to another angle of the same issue. Renewable energies are being deployed, as seen in the Gulf or elsewhere, but their value depends on the infrastructure connecting them to end uses. A network that bottlenecks industrial demand also bottlenecks the transition.
The Geography of Grid Connections as a Transition Indicator
French reindustrialization is not a Parisian phenomenon. It is happening in the Moselle basins, in Alpine valleys, in Norman port zones, in areas converting away from former automotive industry. These territories carry projects whose sponsors have fewer resources to navigate maturity criteria.
An alternative, more liberal reading deserves to be posed. Following Philippe Aghion’s logic on Schumpeterian creative destruction, a strict maturity criterion selects viable projects and avoids allocating network resources to dossiers that will not materialize. Wanting to force connection of immature projects in the name of geography risks wasting a scarce public resource on poorly-engaged industrial bets. The argument has consistency.
But it obscures an initial asymmetry. A project’s financial maturity also depends on visibility regarding connection: uncertainty over connection timelines affects the financing capacity of project sponsors. The maturity rule and connection uncertainty widen gaps between project sponsors based on their initial capitalization and access to administrative resources.
Building an Access Rule Without Reproducing Established Advantages
Prefinancing maturity studies raises an operational limit of its own: it displaces the filter without removing it. If access to this prefinancing is itself conditioned on complex administrative criteria, the bias reconstitutes itself at the previous step. Any attempt to correct a criterion upstream risks reproducing the same asymmetry at an earlier stage, unless qualification procedures are simultaneously simplified.
By 2030–2035, the maturity criterion can be refined, but it risks then becoming unmanageable. Two trajectories are emerging, which do not depend solely on RTE.
In the first scenario, the current rule remains defined only by financial and administrative maturity. The 33 GW waiting will gradually be absorbed, but RTE plans capacities in industrial-port poles and five intermediate zones, while planning accelerated connections for certain very high-power projects. RTE also plans new capacities in several intermediate industrial zones; exclusion of conversion areas is not established. The transition will happen, but it will happen where capital was already present.
In the second scenario, RTE or the regulator introduces a layer of geographic criteria into the prioritization mechanism—a capacity reserve dedicated to projects in industrial conversion zones, distinct from the general queue. This scenario requires an explicit political decision: arbitrating in favor of territorial cohesion rather than pure allocation efficiency. It also requires an administrative capacity that RTE does not have today: evaluating the zone, qualifying the conversion, verifying eligibility.
A complementary avenue merits attention: publicly prefinancing maturity studies for diffuse project sponsors. If the maturity criterion remains the filter, but access to studies allowing satisfaction of this criterion is itself conditioned on available capital, the bias perpetuates upstream. A prefinancing mechanism, via Bpifrance or regions, would allow geographically priority projects to clear the maturity bar without the balance sheet of a large industrial group. The signal to watch in upcoming editions of the RTE Network Investment Outlook is the geographic distribution of granted connections among the 200 currently waiting projects.
RTE’s Arbitration and the State’s Regulatory Role
It is tempting to read RTE’s decision as a technical one. It is also a political decision, even if it was not made in cabinet council. Choosing who accesses the network first directs the geography of industrial transition and its actors.
Rodrik formulated it precisely: the state as arbiter of access to collective resources is legitimate, and potentially more efficient than the state as producer, provided that arbitration rules are transparent, binding, and designed to correct initial asymmetries rather than amplify them. On transparency, the maturity rule is a real step forward from first-come, first-served. On enforceability, the criteria published by RTE give project sponsors a basis for planning. On correcting asymmetries, the work remains open.
Data centers consume electricity, pay local taxes, employ technicians, and their demand finances part of the network that diffuse industrialists then use. The issue is building an access rule whose criteria do not structurally exclude project sponsors with less capital. The geography of industrial transition conditions that of social cohesion for the next twenty years. Hannah Ritchie showed this in her work on environmental data: successful transitions are those that bring territories along, not just the best-capitalized actors.
The 2027 RTE Network Investment Outlook will say whether France has begun answering this question, or whether it has simply neatly organized the queue of the usual winners.
Sources
- Review-Energy / RTE Network Investment Outlook 2026: https://www.review-energy.com/otras-fuentes/france-to-invest-8-billion-by-2030-to-accelerate-grid-connections-and-renewable-energy-integration
- Dani Rodrik, Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691268316/shared-prosperity-in-a-fractured-world
- RTE Network Investment Outlook 2026 (full report), Réseau de Transport d’Électricité, no direct link available
- Dutch network data 2026, Tennet / Dutch energy regulator authority, no direct link available
