Summer tensions in Tunisia, companies unable to connect immediately to the Netherlands, a historic blackout in the Iberian Peninsula, nuclear plants threatened by drought on the Danube, sabotage in Germany, and booming demand from American data centers: the electricity crisis does not take the same form everywhere.
But one conclusion is emerging: producing electricity is not enough. It must also be possible to transport it, to distribute it, and to have sufficient capacity when demand surges.
- In Tunisia, the energy independence rate has fallen to 34% by end July 2026, despite 1,163 MW of renewable capacity installed.
- In the Netherlands, thousands of households and businesses are now waiting for connection capacity.
- The drought has nearly shut down Hungary’s Paks nuclear plant and forced Romania to shut down one reactor at Cernavodă.
- In Germany, a sabotage temporarily removed 4,200 MW of lignite capacity.
- In the United States, PJM recorded a peak demand estimated at 168.158 GW.
- In Texas, connection requests reach more than 474 GW, of which about 90% come from data center projects.
Tunisia: 34% energy independence despite 1,163 MW of renewables
In Tunisia, the high summer consumption regularly underscores the need to constantly maintain the balance between available production and demand.
The energy context remains constrained: according to the latest indicators from the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy, the energy independence rate has fallen to 34% by the end of July 2026, down from 37% a year earlier.
At the same time, total installed renewable capacity reached 1,163 MW.
The Tunisian equation therefore is not limited to the number of plants: it concerns simultaneously the availability of gas and other energy resources, peak demand, renewable production, and the grid’s capacity to integrate new installations.
Spain: when an entire electrical system can fail
On April 28, 2025, continental Spain and Portugal experienced a widespread blackout that deprived tens of millions of people of electricity for several hours.
The European final report published in March 2026 highlighted a combination of phenomena: oscillations, voltage and reactive power control problems, rapid losses of production, and cascading disconnections.
The event reminds that a system with substantial production capacity can also collapse when the technical balance of the grid degrades rapidly.
An aging European networkIn its 2023 Network Action Plan, the European Commission notes that 40% of the EU’s distribution networks are over 40 years old. It estimated €584 billion needed for investments in electricity networks by 2030. The 40% figure indeed relates to distribution, not the entire transmission network.
Netherlands: electricity, but not enough space to connect
The Dutch problem is almost the opposite.
Electricity is available, but parts of the network are so congested that new users must wait to obtain a connection or an increase in capacity.
At Liander, around 7,300 households and small businesses were already on a waiting list in June, with delays of several years in some areas.
Since July 1, 2026, rules also allow placing small consumers on the waiting list in congested regions and allocating capacity according to priorities.
The contrast with Tunisia is instructive: in the Netherlands, the challenge is mostly to transmit and connect a new demand; in Tunisia, the issue is more about balancing available production, fuel, peak demand, and the grid.
Hungary and Romania: two nuclear plants dependent on the same river
The summer of 2026 revealed another vulnerability: that of climate.
In Hungary, the Paks nuclear power plant, which accounts for more than 40% of national electricity production — often rounded to about half in the press — nearly shut down when the Danube fell to a historically low level.
Output, normally around 2,000 MW, had dropped to about 240 MW. According to the Hungarian prime minister, the plant was only a few millimeters from the threshold requiring its total shutdown.
The subsequent rise in the Danube by about 19 centimeters allowed reconnecting another turbine and raised production to around 500 MW.
Romania faced the same problem. One of the two reactors at Cernavodă had to be shut down due to lack of water. Nuclear traditionally provides about 20% of Romanian electricity.
Nearly two-thirds of the Danube then displayed flows among the lowest observed in 34 years.
Two countries, two nuclear plants, and the same river: even with fuel and reactors available, electricity can be in short supply if the water needed for cooling is no longer sufficient.
Germany: five units and 4 200 MW withdrawn from the grid after sabotage
The German case belongs to yet another category.
On September 1, an incident near an Amprion substation led RWE to temporarily remove from the grid five lignite units representing 4 200 MW of capacity.
These were the Neurath G and F units as well as Niederaußem H, G and K. They were supplying about 3 000 MW to the grid at the time of the incident.
A few days later, police arrested a 48-year-old man suspected of involvement in several sabotage acts against infrastructure. Investigators point to a motive related to extremist climate activism.
Germany thus reminds that a modern grid must also be physically protected against sabotage.
United States: a 168 GW record and data centers called to relieve the grid
In the United States, the main challenge is the extremely rapid growth in demand.
PJM, which runs the largest U.S. electricity network and serves about 67 million people, recorded on July 2, 2026 a historic peak estimated at 168.158 GW, surpassing the 165.563 GW record set twenty years earlier.
This figure remains provisional: the instant peak measured was about 162.7 GW. PJM then accounts for electricity saved through load-shedding programs, whose final performance requires several weeks of calculations.
The tension also showed up in markets: the day-ahead price for peak hours at the PJM West hub reached $479.27/MWh, with hourly blocks occasionally exceeding four digits.
The federal government even used its emergency powers to authorize PJM to mobilize standby generators at data centers and other large sites to reduce their draw on the grid when system security requires it.
In other words, data centers are no longer only new consumers: they are starting to be integrated into devices that help relieve the grid during critical periods.
Texas: 474 GW of requests, of which 90% linked to data centers
Texas more clearly illustrates the scale of the phenomenon.
According to Governor Greg Abbott, ERCOT was reviewing more than 474 GW of connection requests in early August.
That is more than five times Texas’s historic electricity consumption record. About 90% of these requests are associated with data centers.
474 GW does not mean 474 GW will be builtERCOT and industry players note that a substantial portion of the queue consists of projects that will probably never come to fruition, or requests filed multiple times for the same project. So this figure measures potential pressure on the grid, not a certain future consumption.
In response to this flood of requests, ERCOT created Batch Zero, which studies together large projects of 75 MW or more to determine how many can realistically be connected and what grid reinforcements are needed.
Around 250 to 300 projects, mostly data centers, must be checked in this first wave. They alone represent around 200 GW of potential demand.
On August 3, 2026, Greg Abbott asked ERCOT and the Texas regulator to conduct a full audit before authorizing project advancement. ERCOT immediately suspended the deadline four days later for Batch Zero ranking.
Smaller installations are not completely ruled out: ERCOT also requests information on the local impact of data center projects between 25 and 75 MW.
Texas had already anticipated this evolution with Senate Bill 6, effective in 2025. The text notably provides that some very large consumptions can be reduced in an emergency and creates a service enabling ERCOT to seek demand reductions from consumers of 75 MW or more.
PJM and Texas are thus gradually converging toward the same idea: when data centers become comparable to small power plants in their consumption, they should also be able to be shed when the grid is in danger.
Three crises behind a single word
There is ultimately not a single global electricity crisis.
The first concerns the availability of production and fuel. Tunisia belongs mainly to this category, with high energy dependence and demand that can rise sharply at peak summer times.
The second is congestion. Electricity exists, but lines, substations, and transformers cannot absorb new uses quickly enough. This is the case in the Netherlands and, in a dramatic form, in Texas.
The third is external vulnerabilities. Drought in Hungary and Romania, sabotage in Germany, or systemic outage in the Iberian Peninsula: a grid can be weakened by events that have nothing to do with the number of plants installed.
Electric security now depends on several elements at once: to produce, to transport, to distribute, to balance, and to protect.
For Tunisia, the international comparison offers an important lesson: investing in production is no longer sufficient. The modernization of the grid, its capacity to absorb new installations, and its resilience also become conditions of economic security.
