Future of Utilities: Energy Transition Amsterdam 2026 — What Six Conversations Told Us About an Industry at a Crossroads

Future of Utilities: Energy Transition in Amsterdam this year couldn't have been more timely: kicking off six weeks after the US and Israel launched 'Operation Epic Fury' in Iran, with global energy markets already starting to feel the impact of that conflict on prices and availability. In the face of ever-increasing volatility, the event was the perfect place for conversations about how Europe could deliver an energy transition capable of protecting the region from the kind of geopolitical instability that is becoming a structural feature of the world rather than an occasional disruption.

This is perhaps the biggest shift we've seen over the past five to ten years: a move from the climate imperative, which does still exist and still matters, to a wider security drive for transition. It was against this backdrop that we kicked off the latest round of Ignition Energy Insight interviews, which brought together some of the key actors driving the transition itself - government bodies, funders, delivery organisations and infrastructure participants - for a week of on-camera conversations covering policy, finance, infrastructure, innovation and platforms. The variety of contributors meant we got a great view of some of the tensions that will have to be resolved to accelerate the move to a new energy economy.

The thread that holds it together

The clearest message from across all the conversations was something that would have felt surprising just a few years ago: the energy transition is no longer primarily an environmental story, but instead one that concentrates on economics and security. The events unfolding in the Middle East as we spoke gave real urgency and focus.  Avrille Palha of the European Investment Bank made it clear that Europe needs to be autonomous - not as an aspiration or a long-term ambition, but rather as a matter of structural resilience that the continent can no longer afford to avoid. Alberto Oguara of Climate KIC framed it even more directly, characterising the real driver behind decarbonisation as "economy, economy, economy" (shades of Bill Clinton!).  Simon Barnham, the UK representative from the Department for Business and Trade emphasised the point that economies that invested more heavily in renewables were proving considerably more resilient to the oil price shocks that followed the Middle East escalation.

This matters beyond the conference room because the economic and security framing are the keys that can potentially unlock capital, win political arguments across party lines, and survive changes of government in ways that purely environmental arguments have historically struggled to do – as we are seeing right now in the US.

The tension in the room

What was most interesting was that whilst everyone agreed on the urgency of the transition - there was no consistent view of what we needed to ‘fix first’ - and some very different views about where the real bottleneck sat.  

Avrille focused on the grid: she made it clear that without €1.2 trillion of new infrastructure investment, the physical foundation for any transition simply does not exist, and everything else is a conversation being held on top of a problem that hasn't been solved.

Alberto looked at the same challenge but pointed at a different solution - suggesting that the cost of energy is the central issue, and, interestingly, setting aside regulation as the lever he would reach for.

Aarth Saraph, from the UN Environment Programme, spoke about the structures that stop capital reaching the places it needs to go: the problem, in his view, is not the absence of investment appetite but the perceived risk that keeps that capital reserved for safer investments.

Tim Van Amstel of E.ON One identified something different again, the persistent gap between what the industry says it wants to do and what it actually delivers, and described E.ON One's entire operating model as an attempt to build a bridge across that gap.

Sara Brooks from EnTech provider Kaluza arrived at the customer end of the same system, highlighting the slow adoption of flexibility and chronic under-investment by retailers as the place where the transition is losing ground.

Simon Barnham, as would be expected as a representative of the UK government, returned to the policy layer, making the case that without clear government signals - the combination of carrot and stick that gives investors and operators the confidence to commit capital over the long term - the other pieces cannot fall into place.

The most interesting conflict sat between Simon and Alberto, and it is worth a moment to consider - because it shapes where political effort and investment capital actually go.

Simon's argument is essentially that policy is the foundation: remove the regulatory certainty and the private sector, however well-intentioned, stays on the sidelines. On the other hand, Alberto suggests that making clean energy the economically rational choice, regardless of the regulatory environment, is both the more powerful lever and the more durable one. These are not irreconcilable or indeed, totally opposite positions -  one is an argument about what creates the conditions for change, the other about what actually drives it -  but they do lead to different decisions about sequencing. 

A different kind of progress

Pull back from the policy debate and a different set of changes comes into focus, one that is happening at the level of daily energy life rather than the investment committee. Tim’s description of the "flexumer" - the customer who is becoming an active participant in energy flows rather than a passive recipient of them - points to a structural shift in how we need to think about demand, one that has significant implications for how grid infrastructure is planned and how retailers model their businesses.

Sara picked up the same thread from a different angle, observing that as grid constraints tighten, the economics of self-generation in homes and businesses will improve to the point where it becomes a practical necessity for many rather than a premium option for a few. We’re perhaps seeing that happen already with certain consumers and large business energy users.

What was interesting, however, was the internal debates that were happening about the technology choices needed to move things forward. Her own engineering team, she said, is genuinely divided on artificial intelligence.  On one side, the argument for moving fast and accepting the risk associated with AI; on the other, the case for moving carefully and preserving the reliability that customers depend on. At Kaluza, for now, the "we need to go faster" argument has won the internal debate.

Agreement does exist

It wasn’t all about tension or challenge – one key area of agreement was the need for the industry to work together. Every single person, across conversations spanning very different organisations and very different professional perspectives, landed on collaboration as essential for progress. What emerged across the various conversations were four distinct models: blended public and private finance structures of the kind the EIB is already deploying at scale; corporate to scale-up bridges of the type E.ON One is actively building to connect large organisations with the innovative businesses that can solve specific problems; cross-border infrastructure partnerships, of which the UK-Netherlands North Sea opportunity that Simon described is a particularly concrete and near-term example; and systems-thinking conveners like Climate KIC, whose role is to hold the complexity of the whole together.

We’ll look at each of these in more detail in the coming weeks.

The industry has converged, more clearly than at any previous event we have covered, on the question of why we are transitioning. The economic and security case is no longer a reframe or a communications strategy -  it is a critical imperative, and the events of early 2026 have accelerated that shift in ways that no amount of lobbying could have ever achieved.

What the industry does not yet agree on is the question of what to fix first - over the coming months and years we will need to work out whether or not the different actors can work on different elements of the transition, or whether we all need to be pulling the same levers at the same time. 

The next twelve months will be defined less by the ambition of the commitments being made and more by how they are put into action - which investments get prioritised, which policy controls are put into place and which collaborative structures turn out to be built for speed and delivery rather than visibility. The energy transition does not lack momentum or intent, but now needs some precision about the order of operations.

What's next

These six conversations are the starting point for a four-part series going deeper on the themes that emerged across the week in Amsterdam:

• The infrastructure deficit: why the grid question cannot wait, and what €1.2 trillion of investment actually means in practice for the people who have to deliver it.

• The finance gap: how the UN, the EIB and private capital are working to reduce perceived investor risk in the markets that need it most urgently.

• The execution problem: what E.ON One's model tells us about closing the distance between ambition and delivery, and why that gap keeps widening.

• The customer revolution: flexibility, self-generation and the question of whether retailers will lead the next phase of the transition or find themselves marginalised by it.

All of the full conversations are available now on the Ignition Energy Insights YouTube channel. And if you have a view on the questions that this series has raised – get in touch – we’d love to feature it.