ARTICLE
1,600 attendees. 130 speakers. 907 1-2-1 meetings. 6 stages running simultaneously across 2 days.
Gianni Commessatti of Engie Italia opened the summit by noting he had written his slide on energy system instability a month earlier, and it had never felt more relevant. Varun Kapur of TCS followed with a keynote on making AI work in practice for the energy transition, before the Leaders’ Forum brought together Maja de Vibe of Statkraft, Kristofer Fröjd of Decade Energy and Kim Maren Ekrutt of SAP.
Maja de Vibe asked the question that stayed with the summit all week: “We are standing at a bit of a crossroads for Europe’s energy transition – are we going to accelerate, or are we going to roll back decades of progress?”
Kristofer Fröjd reframed the challenge: “We need to stop treating the energy transition as a generation problem. We need to think of it as a systems complexity problem.” His other line travelled further: “In the future, it’s going to be more challenging to be slow than fast.” The audience came back to it. The most-voted question of the entire summit asked what large corporates can actually do to move faster when the system seems designed for caution.
The afternoon spread across six simultaneous stages. On the Blue Stage, the customer track ran with Tom Pakenham of Centrica: “What I’ve learned from my successes and my failures is that as soon as you lose sight of the customer’s needs, you lose them.” Wilko Schuijff of Eneco made the same point commercially: “We’ve redesigned the energy system – but retail products still behave like it’s 2016. It’s time to align product design with our new renewable system.”
Jacek Lawrecki of Fortum, in a session on trust as a strategic asset, said the thing that stopped the room: “If the energy transition fails, it will not fail because of the technology – we have the technology. It will fail because of mistrust.”
Day one closed with the energy security panel. Sven Bontenbal of Vattenfall: “A true energy independent Europe – I don’t believe it.” And: “We seem to have no leverage. We need to solve that leverage problem.” Jari Stenius of Fortum brought Finland’s perspective – “we are at the heart of national security whether we want to be or not” – and the clearest definition of resilience on offer: “From our view, the most secure system is the most balanced possible system.” Francesca Bodini of Eurogas made the case for diversification of both fuel sources and trading partners as the only practical route to a system that holds up under shock.
The Flexibility Workshop – facilitated by Zac Curtis of E.ON Next, Kristofer Fröjd of Decade Energy and Mandy Martin of Smart DCC – brought more than 50 participants together to work through the real barriers to deploying flexibility at speed and scale. Three questions drove it: how do you deploy flexibility at the pace the transition demands, what does commercial viability look like long term, and what is the end goal?
Erica Niemi of E.ON Energidistribution had set the frame in her earlier keynote: “Europe does not have a congestion problem. Europe has a flexibility problem.” Zac Curtis closed the workshop with the line that followed the summit into the networking sessions: “The future of flexibility isn’t going to be won by a single company – it’s going to be won by partnerships finding a route forward.”
The most-voted audience question on the topic, from the plenary: “Do you believe flexibility will still be a choice and competitive advantage – or will it be enforced by policymakers?”
Sebastian Weber, CIO of E.ON, opened the digitalisation session: “If our business depends more and more on IT, what about the accountability? When it comes to the core of our business, we need to own that technology.” Sietse Bruinsma of Vandebron: “The main message is to diversify when it comes to your cloud portfolio.”
The two most-voted questions of day two had nothing to do with renewables, storage or market design. They were: “Which strategy do you prefer: Best of Breed or Platform?” and “What is your opinion on a mature European sovereign cloud infrastructure?” The wariness about dependency on US tech platforms ran through the session without always being named directly.
The AI Workshop, hosted by Shelley Copsey and Joe Mitchell of FYLD, addressed a problem the sector knows but rarely discusses openly: most AI pilots in energy companies never reach deployment. The workshop examined where they go wrong, what separates the ones that make it, and what an AI-enabled energy system might look like by 2050. The question the room kept returning to: “Can you achieve becoming an AI-driven company without first being a data-driven company?”
The gas transition track, chaired by Tatiana Demeusy of EnBW, covered hydrogen delivery via grid injection with Fridolin Roth of Axpo, geological storage with Marco Papa of Uniper, and biomethane scaling with Martijn van Drunen of Vattenfall and Irene Zanni of Eurogas. The question that captured the session: “At what point does biomethane move from being a nice transition fuel to a core part of the energy mix – and what needs to happen to get it there?”
The Women in Energy Brunch – held in partnership with Women Energize Women – brought more than 30 mentors from across the European energy sector together with professionals at every career stage. The session opened with Silja Dressel and Amelie Menzel of GIZ alongside Valentyna Beliakova, Co-Founder and President of the Women’s Energy Club of Ukraine. Her account of building professional community under the most difficult circumstances was, for many in the room, the personal highlight of the two days. Mentors came from EDP, SSEN Transmission, Cogen Europe, Eurogas, EnBW, Vattenfall, Skytree, Bundesnetzagentur, Deep Science Ventures, Gentrack and beyond.
The Innovation Stage ran across both days with eight pitches from companies working across AI forecasting, VPPs, residential batteries, industrial heat decarbonisation, home energy management, grid cybersecurity and distributed asset aggregation: Tilt Energy, Powernaut, Podero, Exnaton, Redoxblox, Windfall Energy, SensorFu and Synergi.
NOX Energy were named Innovator of the Year 2026 by an investor judging panel comprising Megan Cain of The Westly Group, Giancarlo Vergine of Over Ventures, Jan Lozek of Future Energy Ventures, Dr. Till Stenzel of SET Ventures and Daan Hendriks of Eneco Ventures.
The summit closed with a session on affordability – why projects remain stuck at the testing stage, how the financing gap gets closed, what the transition costs those least able to absorb it. The panel was Alun Rees of Engie, Vlasios Oikonomou of the Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy, Rafael Solís of EDP and Tim van Amstel of E.ON One.
The last question submitted, in the final minutes of the closing plenary: “Given we’ve recently passed the 1.5°C Paris Agreement threshold – why aren’t we discussing urgency rather than affordability?”
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