Resilience is the buzzword of the moment—from Gerard’s personal resilience on display in Davos last week to the critical issue of grid resilience.  

The great Doug Houseman draws a useful distinction between reliability and resilience. “Reliability is about how well you keep the lights on, while resilience is about how quickly you can restore power after an outage.”  

Over the past year, blackouts caused by extreme weather, human error, and physical attacks have exposed an uncomfortable truth: electricity is no longer invisible background infrastructure. It is the backbone of modern society, and when it fails, everything else quickly follows.  

To explore these challenges, Laurent and Gerard sit down with Ronny Fiuren, one of the Nordics’ sharpest thinkers on energy. Ronny is the Founder of Mylicia Energy, an executive board member, and a strategic business developer with deep expertise in power markets, energy flexibility, and grid-oriented solutions.  

Together, they discuss why resilience has evolved from a technical afterthought into a strategic priority, and what recent events across Europe and North America are really telling us about the condition of our power grids.  

The conversation examines how decentralisation, flexibility, and the use of advanced technologies and AI matter more than ever. It also highlights the need for a shift in mindset, not only among grid operators but also regulators.  

They explore the value of interconnectors in strengthening power systems, while also unpacking their political dimensions and the strong public emotions that can emerge when electricity prices rise suddenly.  

Beyond weather-related disruptions and cyber threats, the discussion turns to new risks such as deliberate sabotage and how energy systems can be designed to cope with them.  

From Scandinavia to the rest of Europe, this is a timely conversation about how to build power systems capable of withstanding shocks in an increasingly electrified and digital world.

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Read Ember Europe Electricity Review  
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricity-review-2026/

The infrastructure fund industry has become one of the most powerful engines behind the rise of renewables and datacenters. With Zak Bentley, Americas Editor, Infrastructure Investor (part of the PEI Group), Laurent and Gerard cut through the noise to deliver a clear-eyed view of where the infrastructure market really stands today.  

2025 smashed fundraising records, with c.USD300bn raised, but it also laid bare an uncomfortable truth: this is a market in consolidation mode. Capital is concentrating fast, and the biggest platforms are pulling further ahead.  

Global Infrastructure Partners set a new benchmark with its USD25.2bn Fund V, the largest infrastructure fund ever raised. Macquarie closed more than USD8bn for Infrastructure Partners VI, including co-investments, while Blackstone raised USD5.5bn for Strategic Partners Infrastructure IV, the largest infrastructure secondaries fund to date. Brookfield, KKR, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and Ardian were also among the clear winners. Scale matters, and the leaders are taking an ever-larger share of the pie.  

Fundraising may look healthier on the surface, but the process has become longer and harder. Time on the road has stretched to around 25 months, meaning a large portion of the capital “raised” in 2025 was secured across 2023 and 2024. This is not a detail; it is the clearest symptom of the barbell dynamic now dominating infrastructure fundraising, where capital flows either to the very largest platforms or to highly differentiated specialists.  

Sector trends are also evolving. Airports and toll roads, written off after COVID, are back in favour. Social infrastructure is fading. ESG has been reset, not abandoned, and gas infrastructure is once again being embraced, often relabelled as energy transition to make it palatable. Datacenters sit at the centre of everything, hoovering up capital and pulling renewables and grid infrastructure along with them.  

The discussion goes straight at the hard questions: are genuinely new sectors emerging, can today’s giants realistically keep getting bigger, and is there still room for ultra-specialised strategies? 

The answer is increasingly clear. Bigger is not automatically better. Investors are becoming far more selective, and many are shifting capital toward focused, mid-market funds that offer expertise rather than sheer scale.  

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Berlin Infrastructure Conference – 24 to 27/3
https://www.peievents.com/en/checkout/?peievcc-event-id=113021    

Link to Nat Bullard – 200 pages yearly deck 
https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

Heat pumps sit at the heart of Europe’s strategy to cut emissions and reduce dependence on imported gas. Under the EU’s REPowerEU plan, the bloc is targeting 60 million heat pumps by 2030. By the end of 2025, almost 30 million units were already installed — progress, but still only halfway to the goal.

Gerard and Laurent are joined by Paul Kenny, Director General of the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA), to unpack why adoption has surged in countries such as Japan, Scandinavia and parts of the US, while many European markets continue to lag.

After a strong year in 2022, European heat pump sales slowed in 2023 and 2024 amid high upfront costs, a shortage of qualified installers, weaker policy support and an unfavourable price relationship between gas and electricity. Paul explains why confidence is returning in 2025, with 1m heat pumps sold across 13 European countries in the first half of 2025, a 9% increase on 2024.

We also look beyond residential heating to the rapid rise of industrial heat pumps, which could become a major decarbonisation tool for sectors requiring heat below 200°C, including food processing and pharmaceuticals. The conversation explores how heat pumps can add flexibility to the power system, in some cases reducing the need for battery storage, and why data centre heat management is emerging as a key new application.

As the leading voice of Europe’s heat pump industry, EHPA is working to make heat pumps the preferred technology for sustainable heating and cooling — strengthening Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and energy security in the process.

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At Redefining Energy, we are excited to be part of International Energy Week, where some of the biggest names in global energy come together for a packed agenda tackling the ideas, technologies, and policies shaping the future. ENGIE's CEO Catherine MacGregor will be speaking, as well as IEA Executive Director Dr Fatih Birol and Shell's CEO Wael Sawan.  

Join us there and get 20% off your ticket with the promo code REIEWEEK20. https://www.ieweek.co.uk/

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Finally, Gerard and Laurent are invited by Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford university and an energy policy expert, for a live session at Oriel College in Oxford on 25/2/26.

Laurent and Gerard sit down with Jo-Jo Hubbard, CEO of Electron, to explore why the centre of gravity in the energy transition is shifting decisively toward the distribution grid. Jo-Jo explains why the “last mile” is becoming the true engine of system flexibility, how demand at the edge must become a core resource, and why DSOs aren’t confused about flexibility at all — they simply respond to the incentives regulators design. Flexibility, she argues, isn’t replacing grid reinforcement but making it smarter, helping utilities target and sequence investments far more efficiently at a time when distribution upgrade costs are rising quickly.

We discuss how to escape the sector’s obsession with endless pilots, and why real scale only arrives when year-round, rules-based products give suppliers and aggregators the confidence to automate and invest. The conversation then turns to the economics of location — from REMA to zonal pricing — and why congestion at the distribution level is where flexibility competes most effectively with copper. Jo-Jo also lays out what it takes to get millions of households engaged without overwhelming them, making the experience effortless, automated and consistent across retailers.

She breaks down the hardest parts of the DER orchestration stack, noting that the real challenge isn’t cloud infrastructure but standardising how device capabilities and network constraints are described across a patchwork of utilities. Looking ahead to 2030, Jo-Jo argues that no single asset class “wins”: value depends on time, place and service, with EVs likely providing tens of gigawatts of potential flexibility but orchestration remaining the true hero.

We cover the future of interoperability and open data — not via global standards, but through adapters and translation layers similar to those that shaped the internet — and examine the cybersecurity demands of cloud-based orchestration as it becomes critical infrastructure. Jo-Jo also gives a global view of progress, from Australia’s rapid adoption to the US’s accelerating regulatory push and Europe’s mix of strong TSO-level progress but uneven local action. She closes with reflections on whether the centralised grid is dying, who should ultimately control DERs, whether blockchain still has a role, and what a nightmare scenario looks like in a DER-dominated world.

A fast, clear, and deeply insightful conversation on the rise of flexibility, the reinvention of the distribution grid, and the technologies and rules needed to orchestrate millions of devices.

Happy New Year energy nerds

As tradition demands (and lawyers insist), the first episode of the year is the annual ritual where Gerard, Laurent, and Michael boldly predict the future of the energy transition… and then publicly roast themselves for last year’s bad calls.

Before unleashing our 2026 Predictions, we do a mandatory rewind to the crystal-ball disasters of 2025: The 2025 prophecy graveyard:

1. US oil production down in 2025 (MB — bold, brave… wrong)
2. Oil at $40/bbl in 2025 (GR — oof)
3. Geopolitics + broken supply chains + energy chaos = a better, more innovative world (LS — still hoping)
4. A bloodbath for hydrogen in transportation (MB — disturbingly accurate)
5. Record installs: Solar 700GW, EVs 20m, Batteries 200GWh (spot on)
6. The death of all things labelled ESG, Climate, and Carbon (LS — prematurely optimistic)

Scorecard: Gerard absolutely nailed Silver: from $30/oz to $60/oz in 18 months. BP technically survived 2025… but welcomed a new CEO, so partial credit at best.

Michael wins overall, which he will remind us of repeatedly. After heroic levels of co-host sabotage, Laurent loses again, as is now canon.
Our 2026 Predictions:
🔥 China battery systems at $40/kWh, full-system LFP (MB)
🔥 Half of all announced datacenters will never be built — welcome to the credit + grid crisis (LS)
🔥 Wind and solar installs DOWN in 2026 vs 2025 (GR — spicy)
🔥 20GW of solar in Africa in 2026 (MB)
🔥 The GhG Protocol revision fight gets ugly, personal, and possibly litigious (LS)
🔥 LNG glut creates stranded assets everywhere: flat demand, too much supply, tears on spreadsheets (GR)

And yes, plenty more hot takes, bruised egos, and inconvenient truths to kick off the year the right way.

🎙️ Welcome to 2026. Let’s redefine energy.

For our final episode of the year, Laurent jumped onto the Wolfe Power podcast, where he and host Alex Wolfe took a no-nonsense tour through the big energy moments that shaped 2025.  

• Deals of the Year: The spectacular offshore wind meltdown in the US — Orsted’s year of pain — contrasted with the blazing global boom in battery deployment all over the world, up a staggering 50% year-on-year.
• The AI & Datacenter Surge: An extraordinary rise… but how much of it is grounded in facts, and how much is built on faith?
• Scandals & Disgraces: From the SMR pump-and-dump circus to Venture Global’s LNG “ghosts ships,” and of course the Tony Blair report debacle — 2025 delivered drama.
• Innovations That Actually Mattered: V2G is born thanks to Octopus and BYD and ever larger LFP form factors are reshaping storage — real progress amid the noise.
• Quotes of the Year: A remarkable harvest of sharp insights capturing the zeitgeist… and, inevitably, a mountain of nonsense worth calling out.

To all our listeners: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and thank you for riding through 2025 with us.

We’ll be back in early January with our Predictions episode — always a very popular one.

Will artificial intelligence reshape the power grid, or will the inertia and complexity of today’s infrastructure slow progress—or even redefine how large language models, chips, and datacenters are designed and located?  

To meet the exponential rise in energy demand, parts of the industry have taken shortcuts—rapidly adding behind-the-meter capacity through open-cycle gas turbines - OCGT (such as the Titan 350 from Caterpillar) with little regard for environmental regulations. The mantra seems to be speed at any cost.  

Is the AI boom we are witnessing justified—or sustainable? From a technological standpoint, certainly yes: AI capability is roughly doubling every seven months. But from a financial perspective, it is harder to defend—given the sky-high valuations, credit fuelled growth and mounting losses at many of the sector’s biggest players.  

The bigger question is what all this means for the energy system itself. How will AI be powered? What will it do to the cost of energy and the shape of our infrastructure? Will it accelerate—or hinder—the energy transition?  

Hope is powerful—but it can also be blind. Between AI’s explosive growth and the traditional energy system’s entrenched realities, who will bear the cost?  

These are the questions Laurent and Gerard pose to Andrew Perry, Director of the Energy Transition and Environment business unit at Faculty.ai, where he leads AI-driven innovation in the energy sector.   We have a heated debate, trying to honestly lay out the dilemmas in front of the industry. 

More insights in this excellent research by the FT
https://ig.ft.com/ai-power/

Today’s show is supported by the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt. The BMW Foundation unites leaders from diverse sectors to develop solutions that foster an innovative economy and a future-proof society. A key focus is "Energy Transition & Climate Change," where the Foundation drives "International collaboration to accelerate the energy transition." With rising energy demands from AI and data centers, new partnerships, effective collaboration, and the exchange of science-based solutions and strategies are essential. That’s why the BMW Foundation supports this podcast and brings these discussions to global stages by hosting the Energy Security Hub at the Munich Security Conference 2026, streaming live February 12–14.
Learn more at www.bmw-foundation.org

Gerard is on stage with Adele Zhao - Trina Solar and Thomas Raffeiner- The Mobility House at the Smarter E Conference.

In a conversation hosted by Jonathan Gifford, they discuss about the future for the intersection of e-mobility and renewable energy.  

The conversation has been released as an Episode of “Powering Through” entitled The Resilience of Renewables. Participants take a closer look at the power of the e-mobility revolution, and what is needed to continue to push it forward. The uptake of e-mobility in Europe and China is discussed, along with the implications for energy storage and industry.

Ultimately, the promise of a vast, mobile fleet of batteries is presented – offering a hopeful vision for emissions-free mobility and energy provision.  

Main topics:

• What is the status of e-mobility adoption and implications for car makers
• How EVs can interact with the grid and the promise for energy security
• What Global EV-Battery Cooperation Might Look Like

You can watch it on Youtube 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=M2qM58Vz9Rc

For much of the past two decades, renewable energy investment was viewed as a core infrastructure play—favoured by funds and long-term capital seeking predictable, government-backed cash flows. Yet the gradual phase-out of subsidies and the increasing exposure of renewables to wholesale power price volatility have eroded that stability.

Are investors misreading the new market dynamics? And can renewable portfolios be optimized under a fundamentally different investment logic?

FlexPower, founded in 2022 in Hamburg and, as of October 2025, fully owned by Citadel, the global hedge fund, represents this shift. The firm operates at the intersection of short-term power trading and battery optimization, deploying data-driven strategies across European markets.

FlexPower exemplifies how agile, technology-led firms are reshaping power markets by leveraging algorithmic trading, high-frequency data analytics, and real-time dispatch optimization. Their approach contrasts sharply with traditional infrastructure investors who continue to rely on fixed offtake agreements and policy support.

In conversation with FLexPower Managing Director Amani Joas, Laurent and Gerard examine how algorithmic trading and hedge fund participation are redefining price formation in grids increasingly dominated by intermittent renewables. The discussion highlights a structural divergence: while incumbents pursue regulatory certainty, new entrants monetize volatility itself—treating renewable assets as dynamic trading platforms rather than passive infrastructure.

The energy transition is no longer just a technological revolution—it’s a financial one.

Running a power market isn’t just about generating electricity—it’s about making sure every kilowatt is accounted for. Someone has to calculate who owes what, make sure the rules are fair, and keep the system balanced in real time. Think of it as being an accountant, a banker, and a referee—all rolled into one. In the UK, that vital but largely invisible role is handled by Elexon.

Elexon is the Balancing and Settlement Code Company (BSCCo) for Great Britain. They are the neutral heartbeat of the electricity market, making sure the lights stay on and energy imbalances are accurately billed. They provide the transparency, fairness, and precision that keeps the whole system running—and prevent anyone from gaming the market. Formerly part of National Grid, Elexon has always been independent and is owned by the 13 largest market participants.

In this episode, Laurent and Gerard sit down with Peter Stanley, CEO of Elexon, to dive deep into the nuts and bolts of the balancing market. They break down why system costs have quintupled in recent years, hitting £8 billion a year, how settlement processes are being modernized, and the surprising ways AI is starting to shape the market.

Elexon isn’t just about numbers—it’s the backbone of the UK’s Clean Power by 2030 plan (CP30). By keeping the system balanced and efficient, Elexon is helping drive the near-total elimination of fossil fuels from the power grid, making a cleaner, greener future possible.

Get ready for a technical—but fascinating—ride behind the scenes of the UK electricity market.