Saturday, August 29th, 2026 Independent & Reader-Supported
Subsidy programmes brought cell manufacturing to the continent on a schedule. The electricity those factories need arrives on a different one, set by transmission queues nobody budgeted political attention for.
The long-term contracts that financed the world's liquefied natural gas terminals assumed buyers who would take the volume for decades. Those buyers are now asking to be let out, and the terminals still have debt to service.
More generation capacity is waiting for permission to connect to the grid than is currently operating on it. The bottleneck is not construction or capital but a study process nobody designed for this volume.