In the energy transition, the binding constraint has quietly changed. For most of the last decade the scarce input was capital, and the winners were those who could raise and allocate it. In 2026 capital is abundant and something far more prosaic is scarce: a connection to the grid. The next cycle of real-asset returns will not be won at the term sheet. It will be won, or lost, in the interconnection queue.
Capital is no longer the scarce resource
The allocation signal is unambiguous. Infrastructure was the only private asset class to surpass its full-year 2024 fundraising total within the first three quarters of 2025, with aggregate capital raised up roughly 70 percent year on year, and around 40 percent of institutional investors told Preqin they intend to increase their infrastructure commitments over the next twelve months. McKinsey and Goldman Sachs put cumulative spending on power and related infrastructure at close to 7 trillion dollars through 2030. The money is committed, the mandates are open, the dry powder is real. What is missing is not capital. It is the ability to turn a signed commitment into an operating, cash-generating asset inside an investable horizon.
The bottleneck has moved to the grid
The IEA Electricity 2026 report makes the shift concrete: more than 2,500 gigawatts of renewable, storage and large-load projects are now stalled in grid-connection queues worldwide. The United States queue alone sits near 2,600 gigawatts; Europe carries roughly 1,700 gigawatts of delayed projects. In the regions with reliable data, the median time from an interconnection request to commercial operation now exceeds five years. Read that against a fund life and the problem becomes an investor problem, not merely an engineering one: a project that is technically sound but electrically stranded is a capital-destroying asset dressed as a pipeline. The megawatt is available. The connection is not.
Demand is pulling in the same direction, which makes the queue worse, not better. The surge in electricity consumption from data centres, electrification and industrial onshoring is loading the same congested networks that renewable and storage developers are already waiting to join. The result is a structural mismatch: capital and demand are both accelerating while the physical grid, and the permitting and connection processes around it, move at their own pace. In that world the differentiator between two identical-looking assets is no longer the cost of capital or the quality of the resource. It is the credibility of the path to connection.
Why this is a governance question, not a technology one
It is tempting to treat grid delay as an exogenous risk, something the network operator will eventually fix. That is the allocator's mistake. Interconnection timing, permitting sequencing, offtake structuring and the choice between waiting for the public grid or securing power independence through on-site generation and direct energy partnerships are all governance decisions taken at the asset and board level, long before the first turbine turns. The projects that connect early are not the ones with the best technology; they are the ones whose sponsors managed the queue as a strategic asset, staged capital against real milestones, and built a board that could decide fast when the connection window opened. Execution risk in the energy transition is, in practice, governance risk with a physics deadline.
A connection-to-cash lens
I underwrite these assets through a simple discipline I call connection-to-cash. First, price the queue: treat the interconnection position, its stage and its realistic date as a first-order valuation input, not a footnote. Second, separate the two clocks: the capital clock the fund lives on and the grid clock the asset lives on, and design the governance so decisions are made on the slower of the two. Third, structure optionality: parallel paths to power, whether behind-the-meter generation, storage, or a bilateral supply agreement, so a single queue slippage does not sink the return. Fourth, align the board with the milestone, not the calendar, so capital is released against connection progress rather than against a plan drawn up before the delay was known. This sits inside the Capital, Governance and Execution spine that anchors everything I do, and it is where the Moreni Strategic Alignment Framework earns its keep: aligning the capital provider, the owner-operator and the asset around the one milestone that actually gates the cash.
How I intervene
I work as the operating partner and board-level bridge between institutional capital, family offices and the owner-led industrial platforms that build and run these assets. Concretely, that means three things. I sit on the diligence before commitment and force the connection date into the base case, so the return is not modelled on a plan that physics will not honour. I take a governance seat during build-out, where the queue, the permitting and the offtake are managed as one execution problem rather than three separate ones. And I keep the capital provider and the operator aligned through the years between commitment and connection, so the board can move at the speed of the opportunity rather than the speed of the fund's reporting cycle. I do not replace the developer or the engineer. I make sure the capital behind them is governed to survive a five-year clock and to seize the connection when it comes.
The cycle now rewards operators, not allocators
Every capital cycle eventually pays a premium for whatever is genuinely scarce. In this one the scarce thing is not a thesis about the energy transition; it is the disciplined execution that converts a committed dollar into a connected, contracted, cash-generating asset. Investors who keep treating grid connection as someone else's problem will keep funding stranded pipelines at good IRRs on paper. Those who treat it as the central governance question will own the assets that actually turn on. The bridge between capital and industry has always been about execution. In 2026 the energy transition has simply made that unavoidable.