IN Brief:
- The EU wants electricity’s share of final energy consumption to rise from 23% to an indicative 46% by 2040.
- Industrial electrification will increase demand for power conversion, motor control, storage, sensing, and grid-management electronics.
- Electricity pricing, grid connections, semiconductor capacity, and engineering skills will determine the pace of deployment.
The European Commission has published an Electrification Action Plan intended to double electricity’s share of final EU energy consumption by 2040, moving the bloc from its present level of about 23% towards an indicative target of 46%.
An intermediate reference point of 32% has been set for 2030, while measures covering industry, transport, buildings, energy pricing, grid development, and investment are intended to accelerate the replacement of directly consumed fossil fuels. Reaching the 2040 level could reduce the EU’s annual fossil-fuel import bill by around €260bn.
Electricity often remains considerably more expensive than gas, particularly for industrial users whose investment decisions depend on predictable operating costs over several years. The plan therefore allows member states greater scope to reduce network charges for selected consumers, lower taxation affecting energy-intensive businesses, and channel additional public funding into electrified industrial heat and related infrastructure.
Other measures include faster smart-meter deployment, support for charging infrastructure, investment in electricity networks, and sector-specific roadmaps for industrial electrification. Heat pumps, electric boilers, resistance and induction heating, battery storage, electric vehicles, and grid-connected production equipment all require extensive power conversion, control, sensing, protection, and communications hardware.
As those loads increase, power electronics will move further upstream in system design. Voltage class, switching frequency, isolation, cooling, electromagnetic compatibility, and fault response influence the plant connection, enclosure, cabling, controls, and mechanical layout long before individual components are selected.
Silicon IGBTs will continue to serve a large installed base of drives, converters, heating systems, and renewable-energy equipment, while silicon carbide and gallium nitride devices will extend into applications where switching losses, operating voltage, and power density justify their higher device and integration costs. The arrival of silicon-carbide modules spanning voltage classes up to 2,300V reflects the widening range of equipment now being addressed by wide-bandgap technology.
Electrification reaches beyond the switching device
Higher semiconductor production will be required, although wafer capacity represents only one part of the supply chain. Power-module packaging, ceramic substrates, busbars, capacitors, magnetics, connectors, current sensors, cooling assemblies, protection devices, and production-test equipment must expand with it.
European capacity is already increasing, including the opening of Infineon’s €5bn Dresden facility for analogue and intelligent power semiconductors. Yet additional fabrication will not by itself remove shortages in specialist packaging, qualified materials, or engineering labour, particularly where industrial and automotive applications require long qualification cycles.
Grid availability may impose a harder limit than component performance. Factories seeking to electrify furnaces, process heat, transport fleets, or large motor systems can face lengthy connection queues, while distribution networks originally sized for stable loads must accommodate bidirectional power flows, storage, and increasingly variable demand.
Where immediate reinforcement is impractical, local storage, demand response, intelligent load sequencing, and on-site generation can reduce peak requirements. Those systems add further layers of metering, embedded control, forecasting, and secure communications, turning the industrial electrical installation into a continuously managed energy network.
Electrified processes also tighten the relationship between production continuity and digital control. A failed drive, inverter, sensor, or communications node can interrupt equipment that was previously supplied by a mechanically simpler fossil-fuel system, increasing the need for redundancy, diagnostic coverage, serviceable architectures, and assured component availability.
Cybersecurity obligations will expand at the same time. Connected switchgear, chargers, meters, protection relays, storage systems, and industrial controllers may remain operational for decades, during which firmware vulnerabilities, cryptographic standards, and remote-access practices will change repeatedly. Secure update mechanisms and controlled device identities must therefore be treated as lifecycle requirements rather than commissioning tasks.
Thermal design will become equally prominent as more electrical conversion is placed inside existing plants. Compact SiC-based converters can reduce switching losses and enclosure size, but higher power density concentrates heat into smaller assemblies and places greater demands on interfaces, cooling systems, capacitor positioning, and airflow management.
The Commission’s 46% objective does not guarantee that every proposed project will proceed, since investment will still depend on electricity pricing, finance, permitting, grid access, and industrial competitiveness. Even a partial movement towards that level, however, will increase the electronics content of factories, buildings, vehicles, and energy infrastructure throughout the next decade.
Electrification is consequently becoming a broad electronics programme as much as an energy-policy programme. Semiconductor capacity, passive-component endurance, embedded control, grid intelligence, and long-term maintainability will determine whether the additional electrical load can be supplied reliably after the installation itself has been completed.
