Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman is a cultural strategist, art and literary critic and documentary filmmaker who works across art, technology and business. Editor-in-Chief of Creativity’s UK, she writes for international media and consults for startups and executives. Her work has appeared in ELLE, Esquire and Cosmopolitan.
There is a particular kind of heat that makes a city think about its future. On Monday, 22 June 2026 – during one of the hottest Junes Britain has recorded – four thousand people walked past a freshly installed wind turbine into Evolution London, the great glass pavilion in Battersea Park, to spend a day arguing about electrons. I went, as I usually do, looking less for the machinery than for the meaning. I am a cultural strategist as much as a critic – I work across arts, technology and business – and what interests me – how a civilisation tells its own story, increasingly in its economies and its technologies. What I have come to believe, after a season spent in these rooms, is that the energy transition has quietly become the largest cultural project of our time – larger than any biennale, longer than any novel, and far more consequential than most of what passes for news.
This is a long read, because the subject deserves one. To understand why a single Monday in Battersea mattered, you have to understand the two years that led to it: how the economics of clean energy quietly crossed a threshold, how Britain rewired the machinery of its own power system, and what the people who allocate the world’s capital now believe about the years immediately ahead. Only then does the spectacle make sense – the astronaut on the main stage, the electric car given away as a prize, the politician delivering an opposition’s prospectus to a room full of true believers. So let us begin not in Battersea, but with the decade that made Battersea possible.
The price of clean light collapsed, and almost no one noticed
The single most important fact about the climate-technology decade is also the least dramatic: the clean future got cheap. Not cheap as a slogan, but cheap as an accounting reality. The International Energy Agency’s index of clean-energy equipment prices hit a record low in early 2024 – roughly sixty per cent below where it stood a decade earlier – with Chinese solar modules down some 60 per cent and wind turbines around 50 per cent since 2022 alone. (IEA, World Energy Investment 2025) Batteries followed the same vertiginous curve. A thing that was once a luxury – storing your own power, driving on electrons – slid, almost without fanfare, into the territory of the ordinary.
Capital noticed even if the public did not. Global investment in the electricity sector is set to reach about $1.5 trillion in 2025 – roughly 50 per cent more than the world spends bringing oil, gas and coal to market. (IEA) That figure is the quiet hinge of the whole story. For the first time in the industrial age, more money is flowing into the machinery of electrons than into the machinery of combustion. The transition is no longer a moral argument waiting for the market to agree; the market has agreed, and is now busy.
There is a cultural lag in all of this – the reason it does not yet feel true. We are narratively conditioned to experience climate as loss: what we must give up, ration, mourn. But the data of the last two years tells a different and stranger story, one of abundance arriving faster than our anxieties can update. The CSIRO’s authoritative GenCost analysis – quoted, as it happens, from the very stage I will come to – has for years confirmed that solar and onshore wind paired with batteries remain “by a long way, the cheapest form of any generation anywhere on the planet.” Cheaper. Not cleaner-but-dearer. Cheaper.
The demand shock no one fully prepared for AI
If falling cost is the supply-side story of the decade, the demand-side story has a two-letter name: AI. The numbers here have a science-fiction quality. Electricity consumption from data centres is projected to roughly double, from about 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to some 950 TWh by 2030 – by then around 3 per cent of all electricity used on Earth – with AI-specific data-centre demand surging about 50 per cent in 2025 alone. (IEA, Energy and AI) The capital expenditure of the largest technology companies exceeded $400 billion in 2025 and is expected to leap another 75 per cent in 2026. (IEA)
This is the great collision of the age, and it is genuinely double-edged. AI is, depending on where you stand, either the thing that will finally make clean power profitable at scale – an insatiable customer willing to pay to soak up every spare electron – or the thing that will keep the gas plants running for another decade. Global electricity demand, flat for much of the 2010s, is now growing at 3.3 per cent in 2025 and a forecast 3.7 per cent in 2026 – among the fastest rates in a generation. (IEA, Electricity Mid-Year Update 2025) Electricity, long the boring middle child of the energy family, has become the main event.
China built the future and sold it to everyone else
No honest account of the last two years can omit the geographic fact at its centre: China manufactured the transition. It is on track to become the world’s first major “EV-majority” market, with battery-electric and plug-in hybrids together making up roughly half of new light-vehicle sales through the first three quarters of 2025, many now cheaper up front than their petrol equivalents. (IEA) The solar panels, the turbines, the batteries – the physical substance of decarbonisation – overwhelmingly carry a Chinese supply chain.
This is the geopolitical knot that every Western energy minister is now trying to untie at once: how to ride a cost curve you do not control, how to buy the cheap future from a strategic rival without surrendering sovereignty in the process. It is the reason a deal between a British energy company and a Chinese battery giant – which I will come to – is simultaneously a triumph and a question. The old geopolitics of fossil fuels was about who owned the wells. The new geopolitics of clean energy is about who owns the factories.
Britain rewired itself
Against this global backdrop, Britain spent two years doing something genuinely consequential and almost entirely unglamorous: reforming the plumbing. The government’s Clean Power 2030 mission – the commitment to a predominantly clean electricity system by the end of the decade – set in motion what is, in effect, a once-in-a-generation rebuild, requiring an estimated £40–50 billion of investment every year between 2025 and 2030, split roughly between generation and the transmission network. (Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, GOV.UK)
The most important reform was the least visible. For years, Britain’s grid had a queue problem of almost comic proportions: viable projects waiting up to a decade for a connection, while speculative ones held their place in line. In 2025–26 the National Energy System Operator (NESO) pushed through the biggest overhaul of grid connections to date, reordering the queue around projects actually aligned with Clean Power 2030 – some 132 GW of them – and potentially unlocking £40 billion a year of stalled investment. (NESO) The half-hourly settlement systems that make a flexible, device-choreographed grid possible went live in September 2025. A Strategic Spatial Energy Plan is due by the end of 2026.
And it began to show in the physics. The gas share of British power generation fell to successive record monthly lows – 27 per cent in March 2026 and just 19 per cent in April, the lowest in over a decade – and analysts at Ember now describe British power prices as “increasingly independent from gas.” (Ember) That decoupling is the quiet prize of the whole project: an economy whose cost of light is no longer hostage to a pipeline in someone else’s country.
But the bill did not fall – yet
Here is the painful asterisk, and the reason the politics of all this remain so raw. Even as the generating cost of electricity fell, the delivered price to households and businesses did not – because the cost of building the new system lands on today’s bills. The clearest symptom is the transmission network charge, TNUoS, which nearly doubled from £15.97 per kW in 2023/24 to £30.59 in 2025/26, and is set to more than double again to around £63 for 2026/27. (npower Business Solutions) Britain is, in essence, paying up front for a cheaper future, and the politics of that gap – cheap to generate, dear to deliver – is precisely where the argument I witnessed in Battersea caught fire.
The Forecast
Forecasting energy is a humbling trade; the last decade buried more confident predictions than it confirmed. But the institutions that allocate capital – the IEA, BloombergNEF, S&P Global – now broadly agree on the shape of the next three years, even where they argue about the speed. Here is the consensus, read through the lens of someone interested less in the megawatts than in what they will do to ordinary life.
2026 – The year the AI-energy collision becomes the main story
2026 is the year the abstraction becomes concrete. With hyperscaler capital expenditure rising another 75 per cent and AI data-centre demand still climbing at double digits, the binding constraint on artificial intelligence stops being chips and starts being power and grid connections. Expect the year’s defining corporate dramas to be about electricity: tech firms signing direct deals for nuclear, gas and renewables; the return of “behind-the-meter” generation; and a scramble for grid capacity that turns the once-sleepy business of connection queues into a strategic asset. In Britain, 2026 brings the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan and the first real test of whether the connections reform translates into steel in the ground. The political fight – already audible – will be over who pays for the grid, and whether AI’s appetite is a threat to bills or, counter-intuitively, their salvation.
2027 – The year the hardware comes home
If 2026 is about the grid, 2027 is about the building and the depot. This is the year the home battery, the heat pump and the vehicle-to-grid car stop being early-adopter curiosities and start becoming mainstream consumer categories – pushed by falling prices and by energy companies bundling hardware, software and tariff into a single proposition. It is also, plausibly, the year heavy-freight electrification crosses from pilot to network: the first battery-swap and megawatt-charging hubs for electric lorries opening on real motorway corridors. (Octopus’s own roadmap, announced at the summit, places its first UK heavy-vehicle swap hubs in exactly this window.) Watch, too, for storage to do to the evening peak what solar did to the midday one – quietly erasing the economic case for the most expensive fossil plants.
2028 – The credibility year
By 2028 the rhetoric of the early 2020s meets its reckoning. It is the midpoint between Britain’s 2030 clean-power target and the deadlines that follow, and the year in which the gap between promise and delivery becomes impossible to hide. Either the grid build-out, the connections reform and the demand from electrification have begun to pull delivered prices down – vindicating the whole strategy – or the bill-payer revolt that politicians on every side now fear arrives in earnest. Globally, 2028 is when several analysts expect clean generation to be comfortably the default new-build everywhere on Earth on pure cost, and when the question shifts decisively from “can we afford to build it?” to “can we build it fast enough?” The honest forecasters add a caveat I will honour here: the 1.5°C goal, as a literal target, is now widely considered out of reach (RFF, Global Energy Outlook 2026) – which makes the adaptation economy, and the capital that funds it, the quiet growth story of the late 2020s.
The thread running through all three years is the one I keep returning to: the technology is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is us – our grids, our planning systems, our politics, our capacity to believe a good-news story we were trained to distrust.
London Climate Action Week 2026
For nine days each June, London does for the climate economy what Cannes does for cinema and Frankfurt for books: it becomes the place where an entire industry gathers to take its own temperature. London Climate Action Week 2026 ran 20-28 June – now in its eighth year, with more than 700 events and some 45,000 participants, comfortably Europe’s largest city-wide climate gathering. London Climate Action Week isn’t a single conference but a brand under which hundreds of organisations stage their own – a vast, semi-improvised festival of panels, launches, dinners and demonstrations spread across the city.
That structure is itself the point. London has no oilfields and an expensive, creaking grid. What it has is capital, convening power, and a genius for turning ideas into institutions. The week is the city trading on exactly those assets – positioning itself not as a place that makes the most clean energy, but as the place that decides where the money to make it goes.
The themes that defined 2026
The week’s conversations clustered, tellingly, around a handful of obsessions: clean-energy competitiveness, electrification, artificial intelligence, climate finance, energy efficiency – and, increasingly, the fight against climate disinformation. (Grantham Research Institute, LSE) That last item is new and revealing. The climate movement spent two decades arguing about whether the problem was real; it now spends a growing share of its energy defending the solutions against a backlash that has learned to attack heat pumps and electric cars as cultural symbols rather than appliances. The disinformation panel is the tell that the transition has entered its political-adolescence phase – old enough to have enemies.
The insight that matters
If I had to distil the week into a single insight, it would be this: the centre of gravity has moved from ambition to delivery, and from policy to capital. The speeches about whether to act are over; the rooms are now full of people arguing about how to finance, connect, build and staff what has already been decided. The most valuable people at London Climate Action Week 2026 were not the visionaries but the allocators and the operators – the investors deciding which technologies reach scale, and the executive-search specialists I spoke to who are quietly trying to find the boards and managers capable of actually delivering “sustainable solutions” rather than merely announcing them. The transition, several of them told me in different words, has become as much a leadership problem as a technology one. One of the most articulate voices on that shift is Christine Koetsier, an advocate of “future-fit” leadership who moves in the same impact-capital circles and watches the energy transition closely from inside it. She put the point to me directly:
“Technology can enable the energy transition, but leadership determines its speed, scale, and success. Future-fit leaders create impact by bringing together innovation, affordability, and the human-centred principles needed to turn ambition into lasting change.”
It is the right lens through which to read what came next.
And it was into this week – on its opening Monday, as its single largest event – that Octopus walked four thousand people through a turbine and into the future.
The Energy Tech Summit
The (Octopus) Energy Tech Summit was the curtain-raiser for the whole week, and it announced itself with the confidence of an industry that has stopped apologising. Four thousand customers, scientists, inventors, policymakers and the species of obsessive the organisers fondly call “energy nerds” packed Evolution London from nine until four. There was a wind turbine at the door and an electric vehicle on offer as a prize. Octopus understands something the climate movement spent twenty years failing to grasp: that people are not moved by gigawatts, they are moved by stories, and that the surest way to decarbonise a country is to make the clean future feel desirable rather than dutiful. To open Climate Week with a consumer spectacle rather than a closed-door policy huddle was a statement: the transition belongs to households, not just to summits.
hardware comes home
If there was a thesis to the day, it was that the transition is moving out of the power station and into the home, the driveway and the high-street depot.
The headline was a partnership with CATL, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, in two parts. The first was domestic: Octopus unveiled the Nook, its own home battery – becoming the first major British energy supplier to launch a dedicated home-battery range, rolling out across the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. (TipRanks) What matters is the price and posture: a plug-in, self-install unit needing no engineer, or hardwired at roughly half the cost of a Tesla Powerwall. The home battery has until now been an ornament of the affluent early adopter. Halving its price and removing the installer is how a luxury good becomes an appliance – a cultural threshold as much as a commercial one.
The second part looked like a logistics footnote and was in fact the most quietly radical thing announced all day. “Swaptopus” is a joint venture to build a European network of battery-swapping hubs for electric heavy goods vehicles – stations where a lorry exchanges a depleted battery for a full one in minutes. The first UK mega-hubs are slated for 2027, with more than thirty planned by 2035; the partners believe the network could support over 300,000 electric trucks and unlock more than £30 billion of private investment. (electrive) Freight is the unglamorous circulatory system of modern life, and among the hardest things to decarbonise. To attack it with swappable batteries is to admit the future will not be one elegant solution but a thousand practical ones.
Then there was the driveway. Octopus launched what it billed as the UK’s first vehicle-to-grid (V2G) package – the EV Power Pack Bundle, built with BYD: a leased, V2G-ready BYD Dolphin, a bi-directional charger and a smart tariff promising free home charging, for under £300 a month, all orchestrated by Octopus’s Kraken software platform. (Octopus Energy) The idea is deceptively profound: a car parked outside a house is, for twenty-three hours a day, a large battery doing nothing. Let it sell power back at the right moments and the car stops being a cost and becomes an asset – and the grid acquires millions of distributed storage units it never had to build. Underneath everything sits Kraken, the operating system Octopus is now spinning out as a business in its own right (Windtech International) – proof that the most valuable thing a modern energy company owns may be not a turbine but the software that choreographs millions of devices into a single, breathing system.
The three questions
Octopus framed the day around three questions, and they are the three questions of the entire industry: How do we make energy cheaper? How do we make it more secure? How do we get off fossil fuels faster? What the critic notices before the economist does is the order. Cheaper first. For two decades the argument was moral – we ought to act. The summit’s wager, stated repeatedly from the stage, is that decarbonisation must now be sold to self-interest, to the household staring at a bill, before it is sold to conscience.
The politics walked in
It was here that the day turned unexpectedly, bracingly political. From the stage came a full-throated policy address – and not from the government, but from the Opposition. Claire Coutinho, the Shadow Energy Secretary (and, as Energy Secretary in 2023, the architect of what she called “the largest expansion of nuclear power in 70 years”), delivered to a room of clean-tech enthusiasts an argument many of them did not expect to hear.
“There is an obvious energy-shaped elephant in the room,” she said. “Our electricity prices are too high. Our system is too slow and we are simply not acting with the urgency that this moment demands.” Her remedy was not more subsidy but more market: auctioning grid connections so “a decade of delay is no longer treated as normal”; injecting competition into a transmission system “the transmission owners have had a monopoly on”; letting businesses “build their own last mile grid connections”; stripping red tape that blocks gas generation behind the meter or small modular reactors “where needed.”
Her most striking move was to yoke energy to artificial intelligence – and to reframe the whole problem as a “doom loop.” As demand falls, she argued, the fixed costs of the grid are “spread over a shrinking number of users,” pushing prices up and demand down again, “and on and on you go.” The escape, counter-intuitively, is the very thing people fear: “AI could be a lifeline not just out of declining growth but also out of soaring electricity bills” – the energy-hungry data centres soaking up power and spreading the grid’s cost so that bills fall “for every household and every business in this country.” She tied it, finally, to sovereignty: if Britain wants its health data on British servers, “then you need to make it possible to build that infrastructure here,” and the way to do that is to treat “cheap, abundant energy as the national emergency that it is.”
One did not have to share Coutinho’s politics – this was, explicitly, a prospectus for “the next Conservative Government” delivered to a notably progressive audience – to feel the force of the diagnosis. It was a reminder that the transition has become genuinely contested terrain, fought now not over whether to decarbonise but over how and who pays – the healthiest sign yet that it has entered the mainstream of national argument. [Editorial note: keynote attribution to Claire Coutinho per CEO confirmation; verify exact wording against the recording before publication.]
The founder’s confidence
Against that policy sombreness, the view from Octopus itself was almost gleeful. Reflecting on the battery-swap announcement, the company’s framing was that this is “existential stuff for the fossil fuel industry” – that every heavy truck moving to swappable batteries, “happening already in some countries at scale,” chips away at the old order. Between the politician’s warning and the operator’s confidence sat the whole drama of the transition: the gap between how fast the technology can move and how slowly the system around it allows it to.
Voices from the stage
It says something about the cultural status of this subject that the bill of speakers read like a festival line-up. The astronaut Chris Hadfield opened with a meditation on technology and humanity’s appetite for energy. Tim Peake spoke about repairing solar panels in the vacuum of space – offering the day’s most-shared line, that the engineering in orbit was somehow the easy part. The physicist Brian Cox turned the room’s gaze to human potential; Hannah Fry brought the mathematics of behaviour; John Kerry, the gravity of a lifetime of negotiating rooms; Jimmy Wales, the politics of open knowledge against disinformation; and Richard Osman, the reminder that none of this travels far without warmth and a story. (Octopus Energy live blog)
To put an astronaut, a physicist, a statesman and a national-treasure novelist on the same stage as a battery announcement is to insist that energy is not a technical silo but a shared human inheritance – the literal currency of light. When Peake says the hard part is not the orbital solar panel but the working together, he is making a cultural argument, not an engineering one. The bottleneck is not the technology. It is us.
And then, from the stage, two lines that stayed with me because between them they dismantle the last excuses. The first: “We have all the solutions today to a clean energy system – all the technologies we need for it. It’s cheaper than the alternative.” If that is true – and the day’s parade of working hardware suggested it is – then the obstacle was never capability. The second, turning to the AI boom: the coming surge in energy demand “can be delivered in different ways, and this is the moment to get it right.”
Where the money goes
Behind every battery is a balance sheet. The transition will be financed not by goodwill but by capital deciding clean energy is the better trade – and, as Part I showed, that decision has visibly been made. A £30 billion private-investment thesis for freight charging is not philanthropy; it is an asset class being born. London Climate Action Week devoted whole strands to climate finance because the city’s real comparative advantage is allocation.
Yet, in the rooms where capital is allocated, investors draw a sharp line between consumer spectacle and underlying infrastructure. While retail-facing announcements are highly presentational, designed to win public mindshare, serious European capital in 2026 is increasingly flowing into the deep plumbing of the transition. The real money is betting on the unglamorous mechanics – from thermal storage to grid balancing and methane detection – that make the flashy tech possible.
It is also why an event like this rhymes with the impact-capital world: the rooms where philanthropy, investment and policy are learning, awkwardly, to speak one language. Climate and the energy transition were, in fact, among the most closely debated themes at the most recent CC Forum London – the international impact-investment forum of which Creativitys is an accredited media partner, and whose autumn London XIV edition (27-30 October) returns to exactly these questions: where sustainable capital flows, and whether the world should double down on net-zero investment or reassess. Max Studennikoff, chairman of CC Forum, frames this urgency directly:
“Climate change is by far the most pressing issue humanity is facing today. The mission and ethos of CC Forum, as a premier gathering of private impact wealth, has always been to convene people with influence and affluence to identify investment solutions for making the world a better place. Climate action, alongside tackling related areas such as renewable energy, healthcare, mobility, and emerging technologies, must be at the top of every impact investor’s list.”
If the finance world supplies the capital and the leadership specialists supply the people, a third group keeps reminding everyone what all of this is ultimately for: the communities on the receiving end. That thread runs well beyond the conference halls. Michael Dhulst, co-founder and CEO of Supertri – whose global multisport franchise recently brought 6,000 participants to Blenheim Palace – put the point to me from the world of mass-participation sport:
“At Supertri, we believe sustainability is about creating a positive long-term impact on the communities we visit. Beyond reducing the environmental footprint of our events, we see participation in sport as a powerful driver of healthier lifestyles and stronger communities. Multisport challenges bring people together to achieve something meaningful, creating genuine human connections, encouraging active living, and building more resilient communities. We believe healthier, more connected communities are also more resilient communities.”
It is a useful corrective. The same word – resilience – that dominates the climate-finance conversation turns out to belong just as naturally to public health and community life. Decarbonisation and human connection are not competing agendas; they are two ways of describing the same goal.
CODA – The Culture of the clean future
What did I take from a season in these rooms, and from a day in Battersea? Not, principally, a list of products. I took the sense of a culture turning – the moment when a difficult, abstract, faintly guilt-laden subject becomes ordinary, desirable, even fun. The plush octopuses stuffed into the boot of an electric car; the four thousand ordinary customers who chose to spend a heatwave Monday learning how their home might make its own power; the astronaut insisting the technology is the easy part; the Opposition politician calling cheap electricity a national emergency to a room that mostly votes the other way.
The economics turned two years ago: clean became cheap, capital crossed the line, and electricity became the main event of the global economy. The politics is turning now, in public, contested and loud. What has not yet caught up is the story we tell ourselves – still narrated as loss when the data describes gain. The quiet revolution of a week like this, and an event like Octopus’s, is to begin rewriting that story: cheaper bills, cleaner air, a car that pays you back, a country that owns its own light. That is a story a culture can fall in love with. And on the hottest June we have known, with the turbine turning at the door, it was hard not to feel that the future being described was not only necessary but – for once – rather appealing.
