Raising the money used to be the hard part.
It isn’t any more. Capital is available for German battery storage. What’s scarce is a project you can actually build.
The government put a number on it in its own draft of the grid connection package in January: roughly 400 GW of battery storage applications sitting with network operators across the distribution and transmission networks, alongside a plain admission in the same document that only a fraction of them can be expected to happen. That’s the queue. Most of it is never getting built, and everyone involved knows it.
So the rule changed.
Readiness is now scored
Since 1 April, the four transmission operators no longer allocate connection capacity in the order applications arrive. Applications from large storage, data centres and electrolysers are gathered in cycles and assessed together, against published criteria, on how likely each project is to get built.
It’s orth looking at what those criteria actually are. Land securing and permitting status. Technical plant and connection concept. The applicant’s financial standing. Grid and system benefit. The first three carry 30% of the score each. The fourth carries 10%.
Read that as a job description rather than a regulation. The heaviest-weighted thing you can control is whether you’ve secured land and moved a permit forward, and that’s earned long before an engineer draws anything.
Which makes it a hiring problem, whether or not it looks like one.
Months 0 to 3: origination
One senior hire, and it isn’t a technical director.
You need someone who can look at a site and tell you within a week whether it’s worth anything. Connection capacity at the nearest substation. Planning status. Municipal appetite. Noise constraints. That person’s value is mostly in the projects they stop you pursuing, which makes them uncomfortable to justify to a board and very easy to under-hire.
They come with a network or they come with nothing. Screening land is a skill. Knowing which landowners and which municipalities are worth a conversation is a relationship, and relationships don’t transfer with a job title.
Months 3 to 9: evidence
Now you’re building the maturity case, so you hire the people who produce it.
Grid connection management. Permitting. A technical concept solid enough to score, submitted inside a cycle you can’t rejoin for months, with an application fee and a realisation deposit attached. This is where most newly funded developers discover the capability sits with one individual who is also doing three other jobs.
Months 9 to 18: delivery
Engineering leadership. Construction. Commercial and offtake. Asset management, if the model needs it.
These are the roles everyone wants to hire on day one. They’re also genuinely hard to fill, which is the argument usually made for starting early. Hire them here anyway. Against a defined pipeline they’re deployed from week one. Against a hypothetical one they spend six months waiting, get restless, and leave.
Why it goes wrong in the same way every time
A technical director is a satisfying first hire. The interview is straightforward, the CV is legible, the appointment feels like progress and reads well to investors.
An origination lead is the opposite. Harder to assess, harder to explain, and the return arrives late. So they get hired third or fourth, by which point you’ve missed a cycle and the sites near the substations you wanted have gone to a developer who hired in the other order.
The sequence isn’t a preference. It’s what the scoring rewards. And distribution operators are now weighing up the same approach, so this is unlikely to stay a transmission-level problem.
Where we come in
We recruit engineering and commercial talent into battery storage, EV and energy transition businesses across Germany. Most of the conversations we have post-raise start in the same place: a hiring plan built around roles rather than around what the next 18 months actually require.
If you’ve just closed a round and you’re mapping out who to bring in first, that’s a conversation worth having before the job specs get written rather than after.
