95% of Europe's sovereignty problem has nothing to do with defence tech, but it's about power grids, storage, and infrastructure.
In the latest Startup Insider episode, PT1 Managing Partner Nikolas Samios and Dr. Fabian Heilemann (AENU) sat down with Jan Thomas to discuss why the public narrative on resilience is missing the bigger picture.
Three key takeaways:
- Grid connection is the bottleneck: The lack of grid capacity is already blocking data centre development across Europe today. Some regions have imposed multi-year moratoriums on new connections. No AI strategy or subsidy fixes that.
- The industrial electricity price is the KPI of reindustrialisation: What labour costs were to 20th century globalisation, the electricity price is to the fully automated, electrified production of the 21st century. Whoever gets this right will attract or lose industry.
- The solution is technically known: politics is the bottleneck: The scientific and economic consensus is clear: Demand response, short- and long-term storage, European grid interconnection. What's missing is the political will to cut red tape, ideally at the same speed we saw with LNG terminal rollouts after the start of the war in Ukraine.
The world's largest infrastructure investors, KKR, JP Morgan, Partners Group, are already deploying tens of billions into exactly these areas. Ideology-free, data-driven.
Listen to the full podcast episode: