Ask a European telecom operator what keeps them up at night and resilience comes up fast. Networks have to stay available through storms, blackouts, price spikes and cyber incidents, and the expectations only go one way. What is less obvious is how much of that resilience runs through a single dependency: energy.

Over the past months we worked with the ETIS Energy Working Group on a paper about exactly that. ETIS is the peer community where European operators compare notes in confidence, and energy kept surfacing in its working groups from every direction at once: network design, data centres, procurement, regulation, security, sustainability. We came in as listeners. The operators, engineers, sustainability leads and policy people in that room have been living with these questions far longer, and with far more at stake, than we have.

The result is Energy as a Cornerstone of Resilience in Europe's Telecom Sector, with contributions from KPN, Elisa, Proximus, Telenet, MEO and Infravista.

Eight dimensions, one thread

The paper's structure is its main argument. Energy resilience is not one topic, it is eight, and each one pulls on the others:

• Operational. Redundant grid connections, batteries and generators still form the backbone, but electrification, edge computing and on-site generation have made the power supply something you manage in near real time rather than something you install once.
• Financial. Volatile markets turn energy from a predictable line item into an exposure that has to be hedged and forecast like any other.
• Compliance and policy. Availability expectations are being written into regulation, from NIS2 to national critical infrastructure designations.
• Societal. Connectivity is now treated as a public good, which means outages are judged by a different standard than they were ten years ago.
• Cybersecurity. Every energy asset you connect to optimise is also an asset someone can attack.
• Supply chain. Lead times on transformers, batteries and grid connections now shape what is buildable and when.
• Capability. Most operators are short of people who understand both networks and energy markets, and that gap is hard to hire out of.
• Commercial. Thousands of distributed sites with generation, storage and steerable load make operators a plausible source of grid flexibility, if regulation and market structures let them monetise it.

What made it worth writing

Two examples stuck with us. Elisa built an in-house optimisation layer that manages telecom batteries across more than 2,000 base station sites, roughly 150 MWh of distributed storage, turning site backup into a network-wide virtual power plant while holding resilience targets of up to 24 hours. And during the 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout, MEO's mobile network stayed available longer than its competitors, largely because of energy autonomy and load management that had been designed in beforehand.

Neither is a story about buying better hardware. Both are about treating energy as something you actively steer.

Read it

The paper is 27 pages and free. It is not a position paper and it makes no policy recommendations. It is a structure for a conversation, written so operators can recognise common patterns, compare approaches, and see where their own setup sits.

If any of it lands close to home, we would like to hear about it. That is how this one got written.