It's Thursday. The data center boom shows up in a transformer order book years before it reaches anyone's grid. Somebody just published the receipt.
In today's edition:
🔌 Big Story: Siemens Energy's grid unit books €5.4 billion in a quarter
⚡ Quick Hits: GPUs in spare buildings, Sunrun's 4.6 GWh fleet, a German solar record
💰 Capital: Fluence's record orders and vanishing margin
📋 Policy Watch: Texas audits its queue, Dominion prices demand risk
📊 Chart of the Day: US-Canada energy trade slips 11%
The Big Story
Transformer demand lifts Siemens Energy's grid backlog to €51 billion.
Siemens Energy's Grid Technologies segment booked €5,367 million of orders in its fiscal third quarter, up 27.6% on a comparable basis from €4,218 million a year earlier, lifting segment backlog to €51 billion from €38 billion. The company said the major contribution came from substantial growth in the transformer business including data center projects, with Europe and North America the primary drivers. Segment revenue rose 28.6% to €3,624 million and profit before special items hit €722 million, a 19.9% margin against 15.9%.
"We delivered record orders, revenue, and profitability, while continuing to improve efficiency. The fact that our wind business has returned to profitability in a quarter for the first time since 2022 is a fantastic achievement by this team"
Group orders reached €17,926 million on a 1.57 book-to-bill, backlog hit a record €162 billion, and profit before special items more than tripled to €1,623 million.
Full-year guidance for Grid Technologies holds at 25% to 27% comparable revenue growth and an 18% to 20% margin before special items, against nine-month actuals of 22.3% and 18.3%.
Siemens Energy charts roughly 50% growth in power transformer and switchgear capacity between fiscal 2025 and 2030, with brownfield expansions coming online this half. Its demand slide is titled "No market slowdown visible."
Source: Siemens Energy
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five from across the stack, from GPUs in office space to a German record.
Perimeter Compute left stealth to put GPU clusters in commercial buildings with spare electrical capacity, selling AI compute that skips interconnection entirely. Data Center Dynamics
Sunrun reported networked storage of about 4.6 GWh across more than 266,000 systems, with battery attachment up to 74% from 70%, while cutting its 2026 outlook. Sunrun
CAISO floated a draft that would treat a DER aggregation as one resource able to export inside a load zone until net load hits zero, with a revised framework due August 19. Utility Dive
German solar fed a record 12 TWh into the public grid in July, beating June's first-ever 11 TWh month. pv magazine
Massachusetts opened a solicitation for 1,000 MW of storage, among the largest single-state procurements in the Northeast. Energy-Storage.news
The Capital Stack
Fluence books record orders while its margin collapses.
Fluence reported fiscal third-quarter order intake above $1.44 billion, nearly triple a year earlier, and a record $6.4 billion backlog including roughly $850.0 million of data center business through July. GAAP gross margin fell to about 5.1% from 14.8%, the quarter closed with a $44.3 million net loss, and roughly $400.0 million of deliveries slipped into fiscal 2027 on production delays. Two suppliers, one demand wave, opposite execution.
Source: StockTitan
Also in the capital stack:
Long-duration storage is on track for hundreds of megawatts online in 2026 against 33 MW in 2025, per Currence, with Energy Dome leading the non-lithium field. Latitude Media
Valar Atomics, a three-year-old microreactor developer, closed a $1 billion Series B on what Canary Media reports is a wager that the White House's NRC overhaul clears a path to first-of-kind builds. Canary Media
Policy Watch
Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the PUCT and ERCOT to audit every data center seeking a grid connection, and Data Center Dynamics reports that projects failing to disclose power, water, and incentive details would be denied grid access, a disclosure gate in front of a queue the state puts at roughly 474 GW. Data Center Dynamics
Dominion Energy's new data center rate class requires $1.5 million of collateral per contracted megawatt, which Latitude Media calls the only flat per-MW price on hyperscaler demand risk in the country, worth roughly $169,000 per MW over fourteen years. It lands as Amazon books a $551 million non-cash gain on energy derivatives its guidance assumes reverts to zero. Latitude Media
Chart of the Day
US-Canada energy trade fell 11% in 2025 while gas and power held up.
US-Canada energy trade dropped about 11% to roughly $137 billion in 2025, while gas and electricity trade value rose on higher prices and volumes. Crude oil drove the drop.
Source: EIA Today in Energy · August 5, 2026
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