The Netherlands faces one of the greatest infrastructure challenges in its modern history: scaling up the electricity grid. Network operators including TenneT, Enexis, Liander and Stedin invest billions annually to keep pace with growing demand for transport capacity. Yet 60 percent of TenneT’s grid expansion projects face an average delay of two and a half years — figures the grid operator itself has made public. The question demands an answer: why is this happening, and what can be done?

The scale of the problem

TenneT currently has approximately 1,000 active projects in execution or preparation, of which 300 have recently been added to the pipeline. The planning horizon has been extended from ten to fifteen years, and investments are growing at a pace that puts pressure on the existing capacity of contractors, engineering firms and permitting authorities alike.

TenneT’s operational director Maarten Abbenhuis publicly acknowledged that new projects structurally take longer than they did ten years ago. “The easy-to-develop locations are gone,” was the essence of his message. That may sound like a planning problem — but the roots run deeper, and stakeholder and environmental management plays a central role.

Causes of delay: more than a permits problem

Delays in grid expansion are often reduced to “slow permit procedures,” but the reality is more nuanced. Several factors are at play simultaneously:

1. Permitting procedures and objections

Procedures for environmental permits, spatial integration plans and national coordination regulations can take one and a half to two years — excluding any subsequent appeals. If residents or interest groups file objections, this can easily extend to multiple years of lost time. Under the Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet, in force since 2024), the legislative landscape has grown more complex: integrating environmental, spatial and social considerations into a single process demands greater preparation upfront.

2. Protected species and ecological surprises

TenneT has reported that protected animal species were discovered at planned substation locations during preparation phases for multiple projects. In such cases, the Nature Conservation Act requires an exemption procedure, potential relocation of infrastructure, or mitigation measures — all time-consuming processes.

This illustrates a fundamental problem: ecological surveys are conducted too late or too superficially. When a species management plan is only commissioned at an advanced design stage, significant planning and design costs have already been incurred, and adjustments become expensive.

3. Labour shortage and capacity pressure

Demand for specialists in stakeholder and environmental management, permitting and project coordination far exceeds supply. Contractors and engineering firms cannot take on more parallel projects than their capacity allows. The result is a serious backlog: some projects are delayed not by objections or ecology, but simply because there are insufficient staff to work on them.

4. Public acceptance and local resistance

High-voltage substations and power lines are visible infrastructure that affect the local living environment. If residents, municipalities or local businesses are insufficiently involved in the planning process, the likelihood of formal objections grows exponentially. Local resistance is rarely unfounded: people want to know what is being built in their vicinity, why that particular location was chosen, and what alternatives were considered.

The role of stakeholder and environmental management: from afterthought to centrepiece

Stakeholder and environmental management was traditionally seen as a communicative finish coat: informing stakeholders after decisions have already been made. That approach no longer works in current practice. TenneT itself acknowledges this in its acceleration programme, explicitly stating that better stakeholder and environmental management contributes to faster procurement procedures and accelerated project delivery.

Effective stakeholder and environmental management in grid expansion is characterised by:

Early stakeholder analysis. Before the first sketches are drawn, a professional environmental team maps all relevant stakeholders: municipalities, provinces, water boards, residents, businesses, and nature and environmental organisations. What are their interests? What concerns do they have? Where are the red lines?

Proactive ecological surveys. By initiating flora and fauna surveys early in the planning process — as early as the scoping phase — costly surprises in the execution phase are prevented. This significantly shortens lead times and reduces the risk of appeals on ecological grounds.

Developing public support as a strategic objective. Community support is not a nice-to-have but a critical project variable. Projects with broad backing move through permit procedures significantly faster than those facing societal or administrative resistance. Stakeholder and environmental managers who invest in transparent communication, genuine participation and taking local concerns seriously create the conditions for progress.

An integrated approach in line with the Environment and Planning Act. The Act requires an integrated approach to spatial, social and environmental aspects. Stakeholder and environmental managers trained in this integration can bridge technical project objectives and the broader societal context.

What government is doing — and where further improvement is possible

The Ministry of Climate and Green Growth (KGG) collaborated with TenneT in 2025 to develop an acceleration package. This package includes measures to streamline permit procedures, speed up location decisions and prioritise specific bottleneck projects. It also encompasses a project-based approach under the Multi-Year Programme Infrastructure Energy and Climate (MIEK), giving critical projects dedicated treatment.

Positive steps — but the structural challenge remains: the system of permitting and spatial planning was designed for a context in which new infrastructure was the exception, not the norm. Now that the opposite is true — the energy system is being fundamentally redesigned within a generation — process acceleration and professional stakeholder and environmental management are not luxuries but baseline requirements for every project.

Implications for grid operators and project owners

For grid operators, municipalities and project owners, the lessons are clear:

  • Invest early in stakeholder and environmental management. The cost of a capable environmental team in the scoping and planning phase does not outweigh the cost of legal proceedings, redesigns and execution-phase delays.
  • Treat stakeholders as partners, not risks. Residents and local organisations involved at an early stage are more likely to think through solutions together than to file objections.
  • Combine technical and social expertise. The most successful projects have teams where engineers and stakeholder/environmental managers work together from the outset — not in separate tracks.
  • Integrate ecology into the design process. Not as a constraint, but as an early-stage requirement that is taken seriously from the beginning.

Looking ahead: 2026 and beyond

With the projected growth in electricity consumption driven by industrial electrification, data centres, and the widespread adoption of heat pumps and electric vehicles, pressure on the electricity grid will only increase in the years ahead. Enexis, in its Investment Plan 2026, anticipates that execution capacity will remain a bottleneck for years to come.

Grid operators face a dual challenge: they must build faster while simultaneously improving the societal embedding of their projects. This requires a different way of working — and a different appreciation for the discipline of stakeholder and environmental management.

For a consultancy like Innovom, which works daily at the interface between technical project objectives and their social context, this is not an abstract question. It is the essence of what effective project management demands in the energy and infrastructure era.

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