Mike D’Aurizio and Christophe Defert

With a new administration about to take over the levers of power in Westminster, there’s a lot of talk about how to unlock clean growth in the UK – as a way to improve quality of life and address the country’s various economic, social, and sustainability challenges.

A great place to start would be Britain’s national grid. The UK power grid is getting cleaner every year, but there is still over 110GW worth of renewables and batteries waiting to connect to it ^[1]. This is partly due to ageing and underinvested infrastructure that is struggling to catch up with exploding electricity demand, and partly due to an endemic shortage of critical tradespeople like electrical engineers and technicians. Reforms like the National Energy System Operator’s “first ready, first connect” rule are good starting points, but the new administration needs to continue partnering with utilities and local governments to ensure speedy approvals, while focusing longer term on supporting skilled trades. If this succeeds, it could help reduce energy costs, create jobs and boost UK growth.

Of course, this is not just a UK problem. Bridges recently co-signed an open letter, authored by our friends at Norrsken, calling for the EU to become the ‘Electro Union’ – the world’s first ‘electro-continent’. In practice, that means running more than 50% of the EU economy on clean, domestically generated electricity by 2040.

The central thesis is simple: Europe’s continued dependence on imported fossil fuels is not only an environmental problem, but also a strategic and economic one. It leaves the continent heavily exposed to energy price shocks: in the first 30 days of the war in Iran, the EU paid an additional €14 billion in fossil fuel imports. EU industrial electricity prices remain more than double those in the United States and around 50% above China – a gap that has more than doubled since 2019 (IEA, Electricity 2026). The UK is, if anything, in a worse spot: it has the highest industrial energy costs of all IEA members (DESNZ, 2024).

So this isn’t just about energy security; it’s also about competitive advantage. As the Electro Union letter puts it: “Every factory, every startup, every data centre starts at a disadvantage when it pays twice as much for the thing everything runs on.”

The solution, of course, is for both the UK and Europe to ramp up clean energy production, and accelerate the transition towards electrification. This is not an unrealistic ambition; after more than two decades of investment in climate hardware, around 90% of the European economy can be electrified using technology that already exists. This point is crucial to keep in focus: the tools we need for a more sustainable and resilient system are already available. Governments should remain focused on unblocking infrastructure and technology adoption.

But making the Electro Union a reality will require two things. First, a collective vision and commitment across Europe (hence the letter). And second, the intelligence layer required to make this hardware more effective and efficient.

The intelligence precondition

As we have argued previously, the climate hardware era – 25+ years of investment in renewables, batteries and grid infrastructure – has been successful. Solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of new electricity in most markets, and these cost curves are getting more attractive every year.

But the energy transition is already generating a coordination challenge. Europe today has 1,650 GW of solar and wind projects in advanced stages of development awaiting grid connection (IEA, 2025). Across seven European countries, €7.2 billion worth of renewable energy was generated but not paid for in 2024, because the grid lacked the intelligence to absorb it. Abundant clean energy is being generated – but we don’t have the systems to manage it.

Electrification on the scale of this proposal would make this challenge even harder. It means adding yet more new sources of demand – electric vehicles, heat pumps, electrified industrial processes, AI data centres etc (the IEA projects that data centre electricity consumption alone could double by 2030). All of these will need to draw on a grid operating in a vastly more complex, more distributed, and more dynamic way than anything Europe has previously seen.

This is precisely why the intelligence layer – AI-enabled software for demand forecasting, grid optimisation, battery management, and predictive infrastructure maintenance – is not just a nice to have; it is an essential precondition for electrification at scale. It is what makes the goal of cheap, reliable, sovereign electricity deliverable.

IEA’s analysis supports this: it suggests that AI-based grid management tools could unlock up to 175 GW of additional transmission capacity on existing infrastructure without a single new cable being laid; while existing AI applications in energy and industry could deliver 1,400 million tonnes of CO2 reductions by 2035 (Energy and AI, IEA, 2025).

The investment case

The Electro Union proposal is compelling both in its clarity and its ambition. Reducing our dependence on imported fossil fuels makes perfect sense from an economic and energy security perspective. And as Norrsken points out, it could also unlock additional value and growth across a broad range of areas – from manufacturing, transport and agriculture to “industries no one has invented yet”.

A commitment like this is helpful because it provides a target to work towards, which in turn forces us to work out what needs to happen for us to get there. And as part of that process, we believe the software and services layer – the intelligence that makes a majority-electric economy work – will emerge as one of the most significant and underappreciated growth opportunities in climate technology, particularly in Europe.

This is why we are so excited by the idea of the Electro Union – not just as a policy ambition, but also as a signal that the intelligence era may be entering a transformational new phase.

You can read and co-sign the Electro Union open letter at norrsken.org/goodnews/make-europe-the-electro-union

This is part of our Intelligence Era series on the Bridges Climate Transition Partners LinkedIn page. 

[1] UK Grid Connection Queue Size: 743 GW & Rising (2026 Data) | SolarGridCheck.co.uk: Calculation: add up awaiting consents + consents approved + under construction, ignore scoping