2G ENERGY: Power Without The Queue

Britain’s grid connection queue has become the single biggest obstacle standing between an ambitious project and the switch being flicked on. Research from grid consultancy Roadnight Taylor found that more than a third of businesses hit by connection delays say the problem has stalled their growth plans entirely, with directors typically expecting a wait of around three years only to discover the realistic timeframe is closer to eight. Layer the demands of artificial intelligence onto that picture and the pressure intensifies further still: the International Energy Agency reports that data centre electricity demand jumped 17% in 2025 alone and is on course to double again by 2030.

Into that gap has stepped 2G Energy, a German manufacturer of combined heat and power systems that has spent three decades building exactly the kind of on-site generation now in short supply.

The UK arm of the business, established in 2011 and now employing 80 people, sits inside a much larger group. “Across 2G’s German holdings company, including all subsidiaries, there are around 1,100 employees,” says UK Managing Director Mark Holtmann, describing a company founded in 1995 as a manufacturer of gas-driven engines for combined heat and power (CHP) units and now expanded into industrial-scale heat pumps too. The core fuels have stayed consistent throughout that growth. “We only use gas, biogas, natural gas, or hydrogen as a fuel,” Holtmann explains, a discipline that has taken the company from its early roots in the UK’s biogas and anaerobic digestion sector into a broader industrial customer base from 2018 onward. “Industries want a turnkey solution for a project and not just technology that they can put together,” he says, describing the shift from equipment supplier to full solutions provider that has defined the UK business ever since. 

TWO KINDS OF ENERGY

What a 2G installation actually delivers is easy to underestimate if the conversation stays fixed on electricity alone. “Modern societies like Germany and the UK use twice as much thermal energy as electrical energy. The focus on electricity is not even half of the story in terms of energy,” Holtmann says, and it is that gap that CHP is built to close. An engine drives a generator to produce electricity, while heat that would otherwise be lost through the exhaust and cooling systems is captured and put to productive use. In standard CHP applications, this can result in overall efficiencies of around 85%, while specially designed systems that recover virtually all available heat sources can achieve efficiencies of up to approximately 95%, based on the fuel’s lower heating value. This is significantly higher than the efficiency typically achieved when heat and electricity are generated separately. 2G’s range spans from 20 kW systems suited to a single site up to 4,500 kW units built for heavy industrial demand, with every installation planned as part of a wider energy solution rather than sold as a standalone box.

Heat pumps extend that same logic into low-carbon heating. “Our heat pumps can upgrade heat from a wide range of low-temperature sources and deliver useful high-grade heat, with flow temperatures of up to 100°C. When combined with renewable energy from solar PV or wind, you could have a very low carbon heating system,” Holtmann says.

Pairing the two technologies solves a problem that would otherwise undercut the whole exercise. “In the western world, there is a problem with grid connections. The DNOs cannot provide larger electricity connections, and that means people can, potentially, not install heat pumps because of the restrictions of infrastructure,” he explains. 

Rather than asking a constrained grid to supply a heat pump’s electricity demand on top of everything else, a 2G CHP unit generates that power on site, covering both the customer’s own electricity needs and the load the heat pump requires. It is a combination the company markets as its Green Cube of Technologies, pairing CHP and heat pumps with solar and wind generation under a single intelligent control system.

BUILT TO LAST 

None of that positioning would count for much without equipment that can be trusted to run continuously, and Holtmann is explicit that reliability starts with the supply chain. “Our technology is designed for 24/7 operations. It is high duty, under heavy load, and requires servicing, and that requires a reliable supply chain. We focus on selecting the right components for the application, looking at overall value across quality, reliability, availability, technical performance and price,” he says. For its larger systems, that means working closely with a number of established partners. “We manufacture our own engines up to 1.1 MW, while for larger systems we work with leading suppliers such as Rolls-Royce and others. These are long-term technical partnerships, and we select the engine platform that best fits the requirements of each project.” 

Holtmann’s own path through the business, from project manager on international projects in 2010 to becoming joint Managing Director in 2019 and taking full responsibility for the UK business in 2021, has run alongside a broader restructuring of the company. The aim was to build a sustainably profitable and resilient business, capable of meeting the long-term guarantees, service commitments and other obligations it makes to its customers 

That same appetite for staying ahead of the market extends into fuel flexibility, an area where Holtmann believes 2G holds a genuine and rare advantage. “Within the reciprocating gas engine industry, we have specifically developed an engine concept capable of operating on 100% hydrogen. While other manufacturers also have hydrogen prototypes and development programmes, we have already demonstrated the technology in more than 30 projects worldwide. That practical operating experience and the reliability proven under real-world conditions are what set us apart,” he says, a capability built on the same combustion platform the company has spent three decades refining for natural gas and biogas. It matters commercially as much as technically, because it protects a customer’s investment against an uncertain fuel future. “If you have hydrogen available, you could use it in our equipment and it will not be a lost asset in five years when other fuels are available. It is a flexible technology that can be adapted to different fuel sources,” Holtmann says.

That flexibility is, in Holtmann’s view, exactly what the energy transition actually requires, rather than a single silver-bullet technology rolled out everywhere at once. “The energy transition is not only about generating more electricity. It is about transitioning our energy; using energy more intelligently and creating resilience to relieve the grid. Nothing is better than generating energy at the point of demand, everything else has losses,” he says. Net-zero remains the destination, but Holtmann is careful not to overstate how quickly the industry can get there. “Net-zero is important, and we must continue to work towards it. But that doesn’t mean we must try and do it tomorrow,” he says, pointing to the practical trade-offs customers are weighing today between competitiveness, reliability and carbon credentials.

For a grid running short on both capacity and patience, a company offering CHP, heat pumps, batteries and hydrogen-ready engines under one roof is betting that the answer was never going to be one single technology, but a mix flexible enough to meet whichever version of the future arrives first.