Why is grid congestion increasingly becoming the critical path for cold-store growth?

In April 2026, Netbeheer Nederland reported around 15,000 pending connection requests with the regional grid operators, together representing 9,305 MW. A year earlier there were 12,000, representing 6,739 MW. The queue is not only getting longer; the power being requested is rising with it.

The sector itself draws the same conclusion. Nekovri, the Dutch association of cold and freezer stores, is campaigning to have the cold chain formally recognised as critical infrastructure, pointing to grid congestion and high energy tariffs eroding its members’ capacity to invest and compete: operators want to expand and decarbonise, and cannot get onto the grid.

Recognition as critical infrastructure would not automatically provide priority access to the grid. It does raise a relevant policy question: how should the cold chain be treated when scarce transport capacity is allocated and food security depends on it?

That does not prove grid capacity governs every cold-store project or expansion. It does mean “capacity will be there in time” is an assumption to be tested during feasibility, rather than a given to build a growth plan on.

One route is an area-wide energy hub in which several businesses coordinate local generation, storage and consumption. Combining different energy profiles can make better use of existing capacity without requiring every participant to secure its full peak demand separately.

Another route is to connect to capacity that is already available nearby. Developers and operators may explore whether an existing connection held by a neighbouring business, a direct line or a shared energy system can provide access to sufficient power.

These solutions are not interchangeable. An area-wide energy hub serving several parties, a direct connection between two neighbours and a closed distribution system are different constructions, with different owners, permitting requirements and risks. Power sharing also works only when the energy profiles complement each other and the agreements remain viable as participants grow.

How much power you need follows from choices that sit inside the warehouse design: the refrigeration concept and design conditions, building dimensions and insulation, the number of cranes, conveyors and lifts, the charging strategy for MHE and trucks, redundancy in refrigeration plant and transformers, and the required start-up and recovery behaviour. Conversely, those choices cannot be frozen without knowing what transport capacity is available or can be built locally.

So “bring energy to the table earlier” understates it. Power supply and operating architecture are the same design problem from feasibility onwards. Handle them in sequence and the feedback loop only appears once one of the two is fixed — at which point the correction is no longer a technical adjustment but an operating-model redesign.

The same applies to flexibility. A cold store has a non-negotiable cooling obligation, but that does not mean every electrical load is fixed at every moment: the thermal mass of the building and the stored product makes part of the cooling load temporarily shiftable within temperature and food-safety limits. How much room there is depends on the temperature regime — frozen stores are already being used as energy buffers, while chilled product leaves less margin.

Cold and freezer stores can take part in congestion management by temporarily reducing refrigeration load. A capacity-limitation contract sets out when an operator accepts payment in return for not using its full contracted transport capacity.

That does not make flexibility an automatic solution. Operators grow with their customers and are therefore rightly cautious about agreements that restrict future transport capacity. The product mix also determines how much load can genuinely be shifted. Feasibility should establish which loads can be shifted or shed, for how long, what recovery peak follows and whether the agreement remains workable as the business grows.

An energy hub, direct line or closed electricity system moves part of the responsibility from the public grid operator to the companies involved. Who operates the installation? Who is accountable for availability and continuity of supply? What covers maintenance windows? And when demand peaks, who decides which load takes priority?

That shift is also legal. In the Netherlands only recognised operators may run an energy network, and according to RVO grid congestion on its own is not grounds for such recognition — other reasons, such as safety and operational reliability on site, have to apply as well. A private network is not a technical shortcut around the waiting list.

The consequence is operational. Recovery from a power-supply failure becomes a process you design, test and rehearse, just like recovery from a WMS, WCS or MHE failure.

Leadership does not need to select the battery, CHP unit or contract structure itself. It does need to set three principles explicitly: what base and peak power the current operation and expected growth require, how much flexibility the process can tolerate, and what happens when the main supply route or a critical component fails.

It is worth being precise about what a solution actually does. A battery can flatten peaks or bridge short interruptions, but it does not automatically replace sustained backup supply; the question is always how many MW it delivers, how many MWh are available and which loads stay connected.

Only once those principles are fixed do the programme and automation choices become credible. Otherwise a tidy project plan gets mistaken for a site that can run. A building can be structurally complete and the equipment installed while pull-down, site acceptance and integrated testing under design load remain impossible because sufficient power is unavailable.