Local content, grid queues and the bottlenecks that decide energy deals

ADNOC puts a number on In-Country Value

ADNOC has put a number on In-Country Value: 30%.

From 1 November, ADNOC will score commercial and In-Country Value offers together in one evaluation: 70% commercial, 30% ICV. It replaces the bid matching model used since 2018, where the bidder with the highest ICV score had to match the lowest price. The smallest contracts are exempt and the middle band uses 70/30. Larger contracts add an ICV improvement plan, and mega projects get a tailored requirement.

ADNOC says ICV has redirected more than AED307bn into the UAE economy since 2018. At the Make it with ADNOC Forum it set out more than AED60bn of local manufacturing opportunities through 2030, over 200 products plus critical spares, from rotating equipment and power to chemicals and catalysts. The National names electrical submersible pumps, seamless pipes and compressors among them. Many are imported today.

In April, writing about Gulf sovereign conversations, I asked what localisation looks like in practice. Part of the answer is now on paper, and a published weight is something a supplier can plan around.

For a Nordic or European supplier, I see two changes.

The first runs through the EPC contractor. With price and ICV now weighed against each other in one score, my reading is that an EPC bidding for ADNOC work has more reason to ask what each supplier's UAE content adds to its own ICV score. If you sell through an EPC, your UAE spend, local investment and Emirati hiring may count for more with them than before. The announcements do not set out how certificate scores convert into the 30%, so a precise figure is not yet possible.

The second is that more of the competition happens before the tender opens. ADNOC's Local+ list of approved UAE manufacturers has grown from 70 in May to more than 100, and EPC contractors in new tenders must source relevant products from manufacturers on the list. The May launch framed this as priority for approved national manufacturers in ADNOC's priority categories that meet its technical and qualification standards and are commercially competitive.

For products in those categories, the question becomes where and with whom they are made: a qualifying UAE partner, or your own UAE facility if it can qualify. Critical spares are among the opportunities too, which may be a more realistic first step than a full plant. Either way, the answer has to be in place well before the bid it is meant to win.

Denmark triages its grid

Denmark has started triaging its power grid. Data centres are at the back.

Since 12 October, scarce grid capacity is no longer first come, first served. Under an emergency plan Parliament passed on 1 October, Energinet and the grid companies now sort every application into four categories:

1. Households, smaller businesses and critical functions such as health and defence

2. Electrification and the green transition

3. Batteries, storage and other grid support

4. Certain large consumers, mainly data centres

Categories 3 and 4 can now be refused where no capacity is expected in the foreseeable future and the connection would displace higher-priority needs.

The reason is one number. When Energinet paused new agreements in March, about 60 GW of demand was queuing in a country whose peak demand is around 7 GW.

On 21 October Energinet went further. Full access for categories 3 and 4 looks difficult. Public service requests get answers first, in November.

I've worked in emergency medicine. I recognise this.

Triage is not a verdict on who matters. It decides who can't wait, and who could safely be seen later or somewhere else. Denmark has put data centres in the "somewhere else". They aren't tied to one place.

For capital, two details matter more than the headline.

A data centre closely tied to critical functions such as health or defence can sit in category 1. How that link is evidenced may become the most valuable page in a Danish site plan.

And in categories 2 to 4, grid friendliness moves you up. Flexibility won't lift a data centre into a higher category. It buys a better place in its own.

The UK leans the other way, proposing to put AI Growth Zones among the strategic projects at the front of its queue.

The Nordic compute pitch was cheap, clean power. In Denmark, it's now a connection date.

The rate-limiting steps in energy

In physiology, a pathway runs at the pace of its rate-limiting step. Speed up everything else and throughput does not change.

McKinsey's Global Energy Perspective 2026, published at the end of September, describes an energy system with several such steps. Demand grew 2.7% in 2025, with oil, gas, coal and renewables all expanding at once. Across all its scenarios, infrastructure readiness is already the most common binding constraint: what sits between generation and the user now decides how quickly cheap power becomes usable power.

Four constraints now set the pace, and each matters to long-term capital:

1. The grid, which trails new generation by three to five years in most major markets in McKinsey's baseline.

2. Equipment, where cables and large transformers can take two to four years to procure.

3. Firm power, because solar and wind are cheapest before they are firmed.

4. System cost, as network spending rises from $443bn in 2025 to $970bn a year by 2050.

In our corridor, capital is already moving on two of them. In Sweden, Hitachi Energy and NKT are expanding transformer and cable production. In Abu Dhabi, Masdar (Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company), with EWEC, has reached financial close on solar with storage built to deliver 1 GW around the clock.

That is where Nordic engineering and Gulf capital meet: at the bottlenecks, not the headlines.

Hydrogen: bids are intentions, signatures are behaviour

Six signatures out of fifteen winners. 381MW of 2,346 awarded.

That's the real scoreboard of the European Hydrogen Bank's second auction. Not the number Brussels led with when the third round came in six times oversubscribed.

And this month the Commission quietly set auction 4's budget at EUR 500 million. Less than half the previous round.

Bids are intentions. Signatures are behaviour.

An oversubscribed auction tells you developers want free money, which was never in doubt. The award-to-signature conversion rate tells you whether the projects are real. In auction 2 it was 40 percent by count. 16 percent by capacity.

Without contracted European demand, Gulf export projects can't reach financial close. That conversion failure is the biggest single reason Gulf hydrogen is retreating. Not lost conviction. European offtake that keeps failing to convert from award to contract.

One story, two shores.

In our capital advisory work, offtake certainty is where deals live or die.

The contract terms that made nine winners walk, and the Q4 2026 watch point, are in the slides.

What it means

Across the four pieces the lesson for Nordic suppliers and Gulf investors is the same. The winners plan around the bottleneck, whether that is local content, a grid connection, equipment lead times or signed offtake, well before the tender or the headline.