Europe still speaks about decarbonization as if it were a policy journey, a transition we could pace gently, with milestones, debates, comfort. But inside factories, no one calls it a transition. They call it something else: survival.
Because the truth is simple: companies are not in an energy transition — they are in an energy competition. A global race for access to stable, affordable, decarbonized energy. A race that is reshaping the industrial map of the world while Europe negotiates definitions.
Walk into any European plant today and you see the same story. A steam network installed in the 1980s, patched for years, losing heat at every elbow. A compressor room where leaks are so widespread that no one remembers when the load fell below 70%. A SCADA workstation blinking again because the boiler oscillates each time the electricity spot price jumps. Teams trying to stabilize a process in real time, hands on the PLC, eyes on the meters, knowing that every kilowatt counts.
And behind every one of these improvised solutions, there is an engineer who stayed late, a technician who rewired a panel in the middle of a shutdown, a manager who defended a CAPEX request three times before it finally passed. This is not innovation. This is industrial triage.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world moves with a clarity Europe no longer has. The United States signs long-term PPAs in a matter of weeks. China builds industrial clusters plugged into massive hydro and solar baseloads. The Middle East creates entire low-carbon production zones powered by ultra-cheap renewables and hydrogen.
These regions do not talk about transition. They talk about advantage.
And Europe, for all its ambition, struggles with the one thing industry cannot live without: stability. You cannot decarbonize competitively without predictable energy conditions. But today, unpredictability is the only constant.
Factories are not abstractions. They are thermal cycles, pressure systems, conveyors, PID loops, furnaces, dryers, automation architectures built layer upon layer over decades. You don’t electrify a line by changing a paragraph in a regulation. You do it with CAPEX, downtime, engineering, risk — and a level of energy visibility that has become almost impossible to obtain.
So teams improvise rationally. They instrument steam lines never monitored. They deploy edge computing to extract signals buried in old PLCs. They reverse-engineer code written in the 1990s. They patch SCADA systems that should have been replaced ten years ago. They build temporary dashboards because the ERP can’t track energy flows. They keep the factory alive one workaround at a time.
But they cannot fight uncertainty alone. When a plant cannot predict its energy cost six months ahead, every investment becomes a bet. When regulatory frameworks shift faster than machines can be retrofitted, every roadmap becomes obsolete. When the rest of the world accelerates while Europe hesitates, the gap grows silently — and dangerously.
Europe is not losing the race because it lacks ambition. It is losing ground because it lacks visibility.
Industry doesn’t ask for miracles. It asks for long-term contracts that don’t shift overnight. A grid capable of absorbing electrification. Regulatory consistency. Access to capital. And the recognition that decarbonization is not a CSR exercise but an industrial redesign.
Give European plants stable conditions, and they will do the rest. They always have.
But today, we are running out of time. And even faster out of illusions.
Europe can still win this race. But it won’t win it with narratives. It will win it with clarity, stability, and courage — the courage to align ambition with the reality of factories and the people who keep them alive.
Or it won’t win at all.
The rest is noise.