Jonas guested the podcast Bak Skyen and shared his thoughts on the grid connection queue

Jonas Alexandersson, co-founder and CTO of Æge Energy, was a guest on episode 17 of the podcast Bak Skyen. The episodes topic was the grid connection queue — why so many industrial and data centre projects apply for power, and why so few actually get connected.

Talking with hosts Rolf Pedersen and Tore Svanes, Jonas walks through how grid capacity is actually allocated today: the maturity assessment, the requirement of operationally proper connection, and the 5 MW threshold. The maturity assessment is an important instrument at a time when competition for capacity is this fierce. It also gives the DSOs a task that has never been theirs: judging how the development and financing of large industrial projects work in the private sector. It is entirely normal that not every project in the queue ends up being built, and often it is precisely the lack of grid capacity, and the long lead times for increasing it, rather than any lack of "execution capability", that keeps projects from being realised. In the episode Jonas also argues for a radically simple alternative to today's maturity assessment.

The conversation further covers electricity prices and bidding zones, Norway's power balance, and exports, why Norway attracts data centres, DSOs incentives to build, the proposal that new large consumers contribute new generation themselves, and whether a data centre can operate off grid.

Listen to the episode on Spotify!

Please note that the episode is in Norwegian.