As pressure mounts to meet new energy demand, Europe’s leaders face a decision that will define the resilience of the network for decades: how to protect the infrastructure they are racing to build.

Every investment in generation, cables and grid capacity will ultimately be judged on one thing – whether it keeps the lights on when it matters most. Yet as Europe works towards its 2050 net zero target, against a backdrop of AI-driven demand from data centres, population growth and increasingly severe weather, the question of how that infrastructure is protected is too often an afterthought.

Start with the most exposed part of the network: overhead lines. They are far more susceptible to storm damage, wildfire risk and outages than their underground equivalents – and the cost of that exposure is rising. Parts of the UK have already seen customers left without power for weeks at a time after severe storms. As adverse weather becomes more frequent, that is not a problem that resolves itself; it gets worse.

Underground cabling is the safer long-term choice, but it comes at a price – installation can cost several times more than overhead – which is exactly why protecting that investment once it’s in the ground cannot be treated as optional. For too long, cable protection has been viewed the way people view insurance: something you don’t think about until the worst happens. That thinking needs to change. With thinner protection tapes being adopted across mainland Europe to take out cost, we must remember these tapes are all that stands between a cable and an excavator, the outcome of a routine dig is a foregone conclusion – a costly strike, a dangerous outage, and in the worst cases, a fatality.

This is where the UK offers Europe a genuine benchmark. UK specification calls for cable protection boards roughly approximately 10mm thick to protect its high voltage cables – some five to six times thicker than the two-millimetre (or thinner) products still common in parts of Europe. The result: the UK records close to zero utility-strike deaths a year and is generally regarded as the world leader in protection of underground utilities.

Utilities face a key decision with utility protection: invest now or pay the price later.

My mission as CEO of Centriforce is to help energy leaders think through the full lifecycle of these assets —-not just how to build the network, but how to keep it standing. That means well-planned, well-protected underground projects, robust specification that isn’t sacrificed to short-term cost pressure, and closer coordination across the continent so that as Europe builds for the future, it protects what it has already invested to get there.