Gas-Fired Power Plants: Global Gas Turbine Shortage Deepens and Becomes a Growth Driver for Renewable Energy

Muenster – Rapidly rising global electricity demand, driven in particular by the boom in AI applications and data centres in the United States, is colliding with a historically tight gas turbine market. Despite record order backlogs, manufacturers are unable to add significant production capacity in the short term. The key bottleneck lies less with turbine manufacturers themselves than in highly specialised upstream supply chains.

According to industry analysts, the global gas turbine order backlog stood at around 110 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2025, while annual global manufacturing capacity amounted to only about 60 to 70 GW. As a result, new projects are increasingly being pushed into the second half of the decade. For data centre operators requiring additional power capacity in the near term, this is often too late. Technologies with shorter deployment times, including renewable energy and decentralised systems such as fuel cells, are therefore gaining importance.

More Gas-Fired Power Plants: United States Drives Global Demand

The U.S. market is currently the main driver of global gas turbine demand. Gas-fired generation capacity under construction exceeded 29 GW at the beginning of 2026, more than double the level recorded a year earlier. More than 159 GW of additional projects are now in the development pipeline, marking a historic high.

Industry data confirms this trend. According to the company, GE Vernova’s order backlog increased from 46 GW at the end of 2024 to around 83 GW at the end of 2025 and is expected to exceed 100 GW in 2026. Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Power have also reported multi-year utilisation of their gas turbine manufacturing capacity, although neither company publishes comparable consolidated order backlog figures in gigawatts.

Global Supply Chain Bottleneck: High-Tech Components Such as Turbine Blades

The key structural bottleneck is increasingly located in the upstream supply chain rather than in final assembly. Particularly critical is the production of so-called hot-section components, especially highly complex single-crystal turbine blades. These components require specialised casting and coating processes and are manufactured at industrial scale by only a small number of suppliers worldwide.

Among the leading suppliers are Howmet Aerospace and Precision Castparts Corp. Turbine blades account for a significant share of the material costs of modern gas turbines and are regarded as one of the most technologically demanding components.

The strained supply situation has led to cases where large turbines are delivered without complete rotor or blade assemblies in order to meet project schedules. Final assembly is then completed partly on site. At the same time, repair, refurbishment and component reuse programmes are becoming increasingly important.

Manufacturers’ Expansion Programmes Lag Demand Growth

Manufacturers are responding with substantial investment programmes. GE Vernova plans to invest more than USD 160 million to increase annual production from around 50 turbines to between 70 and 80 units. Siemens Energy has already moved to 24/7 operations and is investing approximately USD 1 billion to expand its U.S. manufacturing capacity. Mitsubishi Power, meanwhile, is targeting a doubling of production capacity by 2028.

Despite these measures, market observers expect overall production capacity to increase by only around 20 to 25 percent, significantly below current demand growth.

At the same time, prices are rising sharply. Industry sources indicate that gas turbine prices could reach around USD 600 per kilowatt by the end of 2027. This figure refers exclusively to the gas turbine equipment itself and does not include the total investment cost of a gas-fired power plant, which is substantially higher once infrastructure, heat recovery systems, steam turbines and grid connections are included.

Beneficiaries: Fuel Cells, Solar, Wind and Energy Storage

Technologies with significantly shorter deployment times are increasingly benefiting from long lead times in the gas turbine market. Bloom Energy reports that it has been able to deliver fuel cell systems substantially faster than originally planned in some cases. In a recent data centre project for Oracle, delivery was completed in approximately 55 days instead of the originally expected 90 days.

Wind and solar power combined with battery storage are also attracting growing interest. For data centre operators, the speed at which new power capacity can be brought online – often referred to as “time-to-power” – is becoming as important as cost considerations.

As a result, the global gas turbine shortage is increasingly evolving from an industrial supply chain challenge into a structural driver of the energy transition.

Source: IWR Online, 15 Jun 2026