SEPTEMBER 2026 PROJECT CARGO 17 in Holtum, the Netherlands, scheduled to open in early 2027. Where the Money Is Actually Going Against that backdrop, a presentation from the Energy Industry Council added important context for DHL’s customers and other confer- ence attendees. Campbell Keir, President of the EIC, drew on data from its DataStream plat- form – a database tracking 17,000 energy projects glob- ally with an aggregate poten- tial capital expenditure of $70 trillion – to illustrate the gap between announcement and commitment. “Follow the money,” was Keir’s simple advice to attendees. “When I was a CEO, I always liked to follow the money.” The EIC’s data revealed a striking divergence. While approximately 72% of announced projects globally fall into green categories – mature renew- ables, hydrogen, carbon cap- ture and related technologies – the picture looks very dif- ferent when filtered by final investment decision. Oil and gas, which represents around 18% of announced projects, accounts for a far larger share of committed CapEx. Mature renewables – fixed offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, and hydro – are reaching FID at scale, but investment in non-mature technologies including hydrogen, floating offshore wind, and carbon capture has fallen sharply at the commitment stage, even where those projects have been loudly announced. “Oil and gas projects are going gung-ho at the moment, all around the world,” Keir said. For project cargo oper- ators with North American customers, the message has immediate relevance. The US power transmission and dis- tribution network – the infra- structure required to actually move renewable energy from point of generation to point of use — is receiving only about one-fifth of the investment needed to achieve electrifica- tion targets, according to EIC data. The shortfall is com- parable in the UK. Without grid investment at scale, the demand signal for renewable generation assets is structur- ally constrained. The conclusion is not that the energy transition is stall- ing. Mature renewable tech- nologies – particularly fixed offshore wind and solar – are genuinely surging, and their logistics footprint is expand- ing accordingly. The more measured point is that proj- ect cargo operators should be calibrating their capacity and capability investments against where FIDs are actu- ally happening, rather than where project announcements suggest they will. The One-Stop-Shop Imperative For Martyn Lawns, CEO of DHL Industrial Projects and Senior Vice President for New Energy Growth at DHL Group, the conference underscored an important shift: the complexity of new energy logistics is increas- ingly outrunning what a pure-play project specialist can deliver alone. “Our large EPC cus- tomers – engineering, pro- curement and construction customers – do not want different interfaces within DHL,” Lawns said. “Indus- trial Projects essentially pro- vides that one-stop shop, where we do the interface with the different divisions within the group to make life easier for the customer.” The scope of that one-stop shop extends well beyond the initial heavy-lift move. The wind sector, Lawns noted, has entered a new phase: with approximately 1.3 terawatts of installed capacity globally, the industry is no longer pri- marily a construction story. It is increasingly an operations and maintenance story – and the logistics requirements that come with it are differ- ent in kind from the original installation work. DHL’s response is a new service called Time Defi- nite Plus, built on the DHL Express network, designed to deliver spare parts to remote locations, such as wind farms, within a two-hour window. The service launches across 22 countries and territories in Europe, with a global rollout planned. For EPC contractors accustomed to negotiating with separate forwarders for out-of-gauge components, air freight, express delivery and customs clearance, the inte- grated model reflects DHL’s strategy of offering project customers a single point of contact across the full logis- tics chain. The China Question One of the conference’s more candid moments came during Meyer’s opening remarks, when the DHL Group CEO delivered an assessment of Europe’s com- petitive position. More than 80% of battery cells pro- duced globally are now man- ufactured in China, Meyer noted, along with the dom- inant share of solar panels and, increasingly, inverters and wind components. Con- ventional wisdom attributes this to Chinese government subsidies and cheap labor, but Meyer was more specific. “China is a more compet- itive place, and that does not only have to do with cheap labor,” he said. “It has a lot to do with innovation, with technology, and the availabil- ity of capital.” The implication, which Meyer stated directly, is that Europe’s own policy environ- ment – high energy costs, reg- ulatory complexity, and what he characterized as a “highly fragmented” approach to heavy goods transport regu- lation that varies not just by country but by German state – has made the continent a less attractive location for manu- facturing and processing of new energy input materials. The supply chain impli- cations are structural. The origin points for new energy components are shifting toward Asia, transit routes are lengthening, and expo- sure to geopolitical disrup- tion – already elevated by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East – is increasing. DHL’s own operations illus- trated the point: the company was forced to evacuate eight aircraft from its Bahrain hub (BIG – continued on page 19) (BIG – continued from page 10)
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