IN Brief:
- TenneT invested €14.8 billion in 2025 across the Netherlands and Germany, including €4.9 billion in the Dutch network.
- Dutch onshore expansion remains constrained by permitting, siting, and land acquisition, despite more than 70 projects completed in two years.
- The operator is pairing major capital plans with new financing structures and acceleration measures as grid congestion worsens.
TenneT increased its grid investment to €14.8 billion in 2025 across the Netherlands and Germany, underscoring the pace at which transmission infrastructure is now being pushed to absorb new demand, renewables, storage, and industrial electrification. The figure included €4.9 billion invested in the Netherlands, while onshore grid availability remained exceptionally high at 99.99977%.
The headline number, though, sits beside a more awkward one. TenneT said around 60% of its Dutch mainland onshore projects are running an average of 2.5 years behind schedule, with lengthy permitting procedures, complex siting decisions, and land acquisition continuing to drag on delivery. That is the familiar administrative grind of grid expansion — less dramatic than cable failures or transformer fires, but increasingly just as decisive.
There was still progress to show. TenneT said it completed more than 70 Dutch grid projects over the past two years. Hollandse Kust West Beta reached grid readiness five months ahead of schedule, and the company also completed major reinforcements in Zeeland, including the Goes-Westdorpe 150 kV underground link and the Borssele-Rilland 380 kV line. At the same time, the Dutch portfolio kept growing, with another 300 projects added and the total pipeline reaching around 1,000.
The next question is whether process reform can keep pace with capital spending. TenneT’s 2025 Acceleration Package with the Dutch Ministry of Climate Policy and Green Growth includes more than 30 measures, including streamlined permitting and earlier project starts, and the operator said it could cut lead times by up to 50%. It does not expect the full effect to show through until 2028 onwards. Between 2025 and 2029, TenneT plans to invest €43 billion in the Dutch onshore and offshore grid.
Germany is running on a similar scale. TenneT said it plans to invest €65 billion in German grid infrastructure between 2025 and 2029. In 2025 it completed the BorWin Epsilon and DolWin Epsilon offshore converter platforms, taking offshore transmission capacity close to 10 GW, while SuedLink secured final construction approvals across all six federal states. Even so, the operator said 391 customer requests for new grid connections were still pending at the end of the year.
Manon van Beek, group chief executive of TenneT, said: “The investments we made onshore and offshore to future-proof electricity infrastructure in the Netherlands and Germany directly contribute to political and societal ambitions, strengthening Europe’s competitiveness, economy, resilience, and long-term prosperity.”
Financing remains part of the engineering story. TenneT said three institutional investors — NBIM, APG, and GIC — have committed up to €9.5 billion to TenneT Germany, while KfW has agreed to buy a 25.1% stake for about €3.3 billion, with additional primary equity commitments of up to €2.3 billion. The money is large, the project list is larger, and the real constraint in the Dutch network is no longer whether TenneT can identify what needs building. It is how quickly a project can get through the paperwork and into the ground.
