■ The bare bones of a large gas turbine, with its blades exposed, being tested at Siemens Energy’s factory in central Berlin.
Orders for turbines to power natural gas plants are vastly outpacing supply, threatening the world’s ability to keep pace with rising electricity demand.
By Stephen Stapczynski, Akshat Rathi, and Josh Saul
Photography and video by Nicolo Lanfranchi
October 2, 2025 at 12:00 AM EDT
Inside Siemens Energy AG’s vast glass and steel assembly hall in central Berlin, engineers are close to completing a 500-ton turbine for a natural-gas power plant. Workers have spent weeks on painstaking tasks with the accuracy of a watchmaker, grinding metal to millimeter-widths and then precisely placing hundreds of parts with intricate patterns.
It’s necessary work because the shaft holding them together must turn at 3,000 revolutions a minute. Eventually, the interior is encased in a protective metal jacket, the culmination of months of assembly and testing, one of roughly 50 finished products a year that will leave the factory on 180-wheeler vehicles, bound for ships headed to the North Sea.
Siemens Energy, alongside its main competitors GE Vernova Inc. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., account for more than 70% of production capacity. They supply dozens of the largest turbines each year, but that’s not remotely close to satisfying demand.
Global Gas Turbine Production Capacity by Supplier
The industry is dominated by three major players
Source: Wood Mackenzie; Rystad Energy; Bloomberg
The world is hungry for power. The boom in artificial intelligence has spurred an explosive growth of data centers. At the same time, demand is growing from consumers and industries as households, transportation and manufacturing are electrifying.
Many countries are shifting from coal to gas as part of their decarbonization efforts. Solar and wind are now the cheapest sources in most regions, but even paired with batteries they cannot yet provide continuous supply that coal or gas do. It’s why demand for gas hit a record last year, with more than three-quarters of that growth in emerging markets, according to the International Energy Agency.
Gas executives faced the ire of climate activists when they called gas a “bridge” from coal to clean power. With the rapidly growing demand for power, these executives now think gas will be central to the future.
The turbine shortage risks exacerbating a major divergence in climate efforts between poor and rich nations. Without gas, developing economies may be forced to keep using coal for longer, threatening plans to reduce emissions. Meanwhile, developed countries may be pushed to more quickly adopt solar and wind farms backed up with expensive batteries.
John Ketchum, chief executive officer of NextEra Energy Inc., the biggest US solar and wind developer, said clean energy should be a “critical bridge” until gas plants can be built.
Suppliers of turbines have been caught flat footed by the resulting acceleration in orders. In the US, natural gas fuel accounted for about 40% of electricity generation. President Donald Trump’s policy moves against renewable energy, in addition to the proliferation of data centers and a thirst for more power, are expected to strengthen its role.
The market is tight, said Scott Strazik, chief executive officer of GE Vernova. “There’s such a thirst for power right now,” he said.
■ The final assembly area of gas-turbine manufacturing at Siemens Energy’s factory in Berlin.
More than $400 billion worth of planned gas-fired power plants through the end of the decade are in jeopardy of delay or cancellation because of the lack of capacity to meet future turbine orders, according to Bloomberg News calculations.
The crux of the bottleneck is that there are only three major suppliers for the largest turbines used in power plants across a handful of factories from Germany to Japan, and they aren’t able—or willing—to increase production capacity fast enough to meet rapid demand.
GE Vernova is already in talks with customers about fulfilling turbine orders as far out as 2030. Mitsubishi Heavy plans to quickly double its gas turbine capacity, but has most slots booked for 2027 and 2028. Siemens Energy declined to give specific timelines on its orderbook, but said turbines are only one of many things needed to build a gas power plant.
“It’s not so easy to ramp up,” Joern Schmuecker, Siemens Energy’s senior vice president of gas service, said in an interview. “The whole supply chain is struggling to also keep pace.”
Gas Turbine Crunch
Orders for the power plant equipment are set to rise to the highest level in decades and outpace production capacity
Source: Barclays; Wood Mackenzie; IEA; Bloomberg News
Cuong Tran Duc is the managing director of CMIT, which provides engineering consultancy and project management services in Vietnam. He has more than 20 years of experience working on energy infrastructure, and has witnessed how the country coped with a rapid increase in power demand.
“The global gas turbine shortage presents a significant and potentially overlooked threat,” he said.
Gas turbines draw in air that is compressed as it passes through a series of rotors and blades, and the compression heats it to about 500C. That hot air is used to burn natural gas, lifting the combusted gas output’s temperature further to around 1,500C. The huge amount of energy is extracted by rotating blades, which keeps the turbine spinning at speeds higher than 3,000 rotations a minute and powers a connected generator.
Since the 1960s, the hot gas exiting the process has often been harnessed to generate steam and power a second turbine, creating the combined cycle design that’s more efficient at converting fuel into electricity and has become the standard in large power plants.
The technology’s deployment surged in the 1990s with the US power market’s deregulation. Gas turbines were favored for their speed of installation and efficiency, triggering a rush in orders.
Yet that boom was short-lived as gas prices climbed and the resulting downturn triggered a wave of industry consolidation that concentrated manufacturing capability with the current three main suppliers. The experience also left companies wary of being too aggressive in expanding capacity.
That history, along with a few decades of lackluster sales and plateauing power requirements in the US and Europe, meant the suppliers were largely unprepared when electricity consumption accelerated after the pandemic, ushering in the new race for turbines.
GE Vernova has made moves to keep pace with demand. Last year, the company announced plans to expand production capacity to 70 to 80 heavy-duty gas turbines a year starting in 2026, up from 55 turbines. And this year, GE Vernova said it would spend almost $300 million to expand turbine production in locations including South Carolina and New York.
Japan-based Mitsubishi Heavy, a producer of everything from warships to forklifts, is urgently seeking to add gas-turbine capacity in the next two years. “We were working toward boosting production capacity by 30%, but that’s not enough,” Chief Executive Officer Eisaku Ito said.
The planned Long An power plant, just 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the center of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, is intended to meet burgeoning electricity demand in a fast-growing economy that aims to double its generation capacity by the end of the decade.
For more than 10 years, the development was snarled by local disputes and the country’s slow-moving efforts to finalize a national energy policy. Even now, after receiving approvals from policymakers, the project faces another hurdle to meet its goal to start commercial operations in 2030: finding a gas turbine.
The tightening of the global gas-turbine supply chain has become a defining dynamic, a spokesperson for Vinacapital, which owns the project together with GS Energy, said in an emailed statement. Though the developer is in the advanced stages of a selection process for a turbine supplier, it hasn’t yet signed any binding deal.
Suppliers are “now requiring advanced, non-refundable reservation payments to secure manufacturing slots – a marked departure from previous procurement norms,” the company said. Other developers, however, haven’t been as proactive.
Vietnam is among the nations that are most exposed to the turbine crunch. The country’s energy strategy calls for the construction of at least 22 gas-fired power projects, including Long An, by 2030. Natural gas power capacity is planned to expand roughly five-fold over that period in a bid to help replace coal. Gas made up about 7% of electricity output last year.
Just one project has secured a binding turbine contract, according to a Bloomberg News survey and an analysis of public information. Costs are rising too, and in some cases that means electricity prices may exceed rates that local utilities have agreed to pay, threatening to make projects unviable.
“Gas turbines require long lead times to manufacture and deliver,” said Daniel Waldek, partner at HSF Kramer, who specializes in construction and engineering disputes. “The impact of these delays has been particularly acute in Asia.” He added that the backlog threatens to lead developers to opt for coal.
Critics of gas worry that leaking methane—the primary component of natural gas—also can undermine the fuel’s green credentials. Ton for ton, methane can be as much as 80 times more effective at warming the planet as carbon dioxide.
Even if leaks can be managed, other critics say that using gas as a bridge fuel for large-scale investments in gas-fired power plants and infrastructure locks countries into fossil-fuel dependence for decades. However, the gas turbine crunch is revealing that without gas power plants, many cash-strapped nations—including Vietnam—have little ability to quit coal and keep the lights on.
Despite an eightfold increase in demand over the past two decades, Vietnam achieved near-universal access to electricity, fueled by coal, which is now responsible for most country’s CO2 emissions. There were early gains to boost renewables, but grid bottlenecks have been hamstringing efforts to accelerate deployment.
If leaks are kept in check, switching coal to gas would help to cut the carbon footprint of the nation’s power sector in half. It’s one reason why many countries across Southeast Asia are rushing to add gas capacity to supplement their efforts to install renewables, and as they attempt to shutter coal-fired power stations, which account for about half of the region’s electricity generation.
Coal-dependent Asian nations could cut power sector emissions by at least a third by the middle of next decade by expanding the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG), according to a June study commissioned by the Asia Natural Gas & Energy Association, an industry group that counts Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. among its members.
Yet to do so, they will need to compete for turbines with developed economies. Consumption in the US rose 2% in 2024 to a record following a decline a year earlier, according to the IEA, and there’s a similar picture across most advanced economies driven by rising deployments of electric vehicles, data centers, air conditioners and heat pumps.
Computing power required for AI has “driven a surge within the demand for gas turbines,” said Lorenzo Simonelli, the chief executive officer of Baker Hughes Co., an American energy technology company. About one third of GE Vernova’s turbine reservations are tied directly or indirectly to AI and hyperscalers.
US power demand is slated to grow 25% by 2030, a reversal of relatively flat consumption since 2010, according to consulting firm ICF. Developers are planning to build more than 26 gigawatts of new gas-fired power capacity by 2028, according to a US Energy Information Administration survey of builders and operators. That’s about twice the amount that was planned in 2023 for the following three years. That crush of projects is likely to overwhelm supply chains, and some may not come online until 2030 or later, data provider Wood Mackenzie Ltd. estimates.
Germany aims to construct as many as 20 new gas-fired power plants by 2030, while Japan’s utilities also are considering plans to build new facilities after the government reversed its view that power demand was on a long-term decline. That’s due in part to an expected buildout in data centers.
Saudi Arabia is aiming to rapidly invest billions of dollars to add gas-fired plants under a wider strategy to boost electricity generation before the nation hosts World Expo 2030.
“Siemens Energy is now an AI stock,” said Joe Kaeser, the company’s chairman, in July. “When people design AI investment funds, there’s always a component made up of Siemens Energy because our products are essential to that industry.”
Utilities in richer nations are prepared to pay at least some of the costs to speed up delivery of turbines, or to win priority. “Many customers are making reservations for future orders, for which they’re paying fees,” Kaeser said.
The rapid rise of AI in the US has surprised utilities that had planned for relatively flat growth in demand. BloombergNEF forecasts that data-center power consumption will more than triple by 2035. Electricity needs from these facilities will account for almost half of the growth in total power demand between now and 2030, according to the IEA.
NRG Energy Inc., one of the largest power producers in the US, signed a deal with GE Vernova to develop up to 5.4 gigawatts of gas-fired power plants between 2029 and 2032. Announcing the deal, one NRG executive said AI is driving an electricity “demand supercycle.”
Turbine manufacturers also are favoring projects in developed nations, or tied to power requirements for major companies, because of the reduced risks of financing shortfalls or complex approvals. In August, Louisiana regulators fast-tracked approvals for Entergy Corp. to build three natural gas plants to power a 4 million-square-foot data center for Meta Platforms Inc.
In addition to availability, the rush for turbines is driving up the construction costs of power plants. A new combined cycle-gas plant cost about $800 a kilowatt in 2021, according to NextEra Energy, the biggest US utility.
“It’s probably closer to $2,600 to $2,800 today,” NextEra Chief Executive Officer Ketchum told investors on an April earnings call. “Gas-fired plants will come online at a higher cost than renewables and storage. That’s because gas turbines are in short supply and in high demand.”
The story is much the same in Europe. Power demand is expected to increase for the first time in 15 years, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. To avoid any power shortfalls, investment in gas-fired power plants and battery systems should total €500 billion ($587 billion) until 2030, the bank said. Gas generation capacity alone would need to grow by about 9% in that period.
China, the world’s largest electricity consumer, is a wild card that may yet add new pressure on the turbine makers. Domestic energy producers are lobbying for the nation’s next five-year plan, to be outlined in 2026, to sanction construction of about 70 gigawatts of new gas-plant capacity by the end of the decade, roughly equal to Japan’s entire existing fleet.
And while Chinese producers dominate entire segments of energy manufacturing, companies have so far struggled to rival incumbent turbine producers. A domestically produced offering showcased last October after years of research had an output of just 300 megawatts, about half the size of large models from the three major suppliers.
Top Turbine Suppliers Surge
Stocks have rallied on ballooning orders for gas turbines
Note: Data is normalized with percentage appreciation as of April 1, 2024. Source: Bloomberg
Mitsubishi Heavy licenses technology to a Chinese company to manufacture equipment, but tight intellectual property protections have so far helped existing producers defend their market share.
Decades of consolidation and secrecy now leaves the three major turbine suppliers—Siemens Energy, GE Vernova and Mitsubishi Heavy—primed to reap a profit windfall from the surge in orders. At least in the short term, no one has the resources to encroach on their dominance.
■ The “Berlin Bear” holds up a gas turbine model at the entrance of Siemens Energy’s plant in Berlin.
“It’s the beauty of our industry,” said Siemens Energy’s Schmuecker. “It has super high entry barriers, because it costs a lot of money to develop a gas turbine and it requires years of experience.”
Back at the company’s assembly hall in Berlin, a huge overhead crane helps maneuver a completed turbine onto a waiting trailer, and staff switch their attention to the next order in an ever-expanding queue.
