The choreography crisis: what needs to change for the critical power supply chain?
Critical power equipment is running years late, and the new factories being announced won't close the gap on their own.
Join us for a working breakfast with the people who rarely share a table and need each other most.
Bought to you by Opna, World Economic Forum's Tech Pioneer 2026.
Part of New York Climate Week.
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Grid connection will get named as the constraint in almost every energisation discussion in New York this week, but the constraint behind it gets named far less often: the transformers, switchgear and cables that physically connect clean power are running years late, and the cause is choreography as much as capacity.
“The median [US] project built in 2025 took 61 months from the interconnection request to commercial operations, compared to 36 months in 2015 and 22 months in 2008” (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up: 2026 Edition).
Lead times on the equipment that does the connecting now run past four years (Wood Mackenzie, Q2 2025).
Announcing new factories doesn't fix a sequencing problem.
We're bringing the discussion to the people doing the work: data centre and renewables operators and developers, equipment makers and capital providers, plus the grid and policy voices who set the rules.
25 people. No panel. No pitch.
7.00am to 10.30am, Tuesday 22 September.
Doors 7.00am, discussion 8.15am to 9.30am, room open until 10.30am.
Opna accelerates your energisation date.
Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are starting to require data centres to pay to hold grid capacity and prove they can actually deliver (Ofgem, July 2026). Delivery means energisation. Energisation needs critical power equipment, and incumbent manufacturers quote 4+ years for high-voltage equipment (Wood Mackenzie, Q2 2025).
Capacity exists outside the incumbents. Opna finds it, verifies it, and stands behind it.
We are the market infrastructure for critical power equipment: transformers, switchgear, HV cables, generators. Buyers get verification, speed, transferable slots they can hold before specs are finalised, and CapEx aligned to their draw schedule. Manufacturers get order book certainty they can build new capacity against.
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