Redefining Energy

Lithium has doubled in three months. Copper is printing record highs. Silver went vertical—then collapsed. The move was fast. The reversals were faster. Volatility isn’t elevated. It’s systemic.  

But this isn’t just another commodity cycle. These metals sit at the core of the energy transition. They’re embedded in batteries, EVs, transmission lines, datacenters, wind turbines, and solar modules. When they move, the entire transition complex moves with them.  

So, what are we really looking at? Is this a positioning squeeze in thin markets? Or the early tremors of a structural repricing?  

The divide is clear. At The Carlyle Group, Jeff Currie argues we’re only “on the foothills of the Himalayas” — the early stage of a structural supercycle driven by electrification, grid build-out, and constrained supply. Ed Morse pushes back. High prices cure high prices. Capital flows. Supply responds. Markets rebalance. Cycles end the way they always have. Two very different frameworks. One structural. One cyclical.  

To cut through the noise, Laurent and Gerard sit down with Matt Fernley, Managing Director at Battery Materials Review and Partner at RK Equity. They dissect what’s actually driving these rallies — inventory tightness, permitting bottlenecks, capital discipline, geopolitics, demand elasticity.  

They confront the supply question head-on: Can new production realistically catch up — on time, on budget, and at scale? And they explore the technologies that could reshape the curve — from the re-emergence of direct lithium extraction (DLE) to the accelerating development of sodium-ion batteries.  

This isn’t just about price volatility. It’s about whether the energy transition is entering a new cost regime. Because if these inputs are structurally repricing, everything downstream changes. And if they aren’t — the unwind could be just as violent.

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Link to the report by the Volta Foundation
https://volta.foundation/battery-report-2025/

Clean Energy equities have comfortably outperformed the major indices in 2025.  

Laurent and Gerard are joined by friend of the show Shanu Mathew, an equity portfolio manager everyone in the sector knows to unpack what’s really driving this performance.  

We begin by putting recent returns into a longer-term context — and by flagging an important caveat: some of the strongest results are coming from highly concentrated portfolios.  

Shanu makes a critical distinction that often gets blurred in market commentary: equipment providers versus sellers of electrons. On one side sit companies like GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, Schneider Electric, Caterpillar — and the surprise guest, Bloom Energy. On the other are utilities and IPPs. The divergence is striking. Equipment manufacturers have gone ballistic; utilities have performed, but at a far more pedestrian pace.  

The difference, unsurprisingly, is pricing power. Equipment suppliers — particularly those insulated from Chinese competition — have been able to push through aggressive price increases, turbocharged by surging demand from Hyperscalers. Utilities, by contrast, remain constrained by regulation, public scrutiny, and political pressure.  

The result? Hyperscalers are increasingly looking to self-generation: reciprocating engines, fuel cells, and a growing enthusiasm for frontier technologies such as Enhanced Geothermal and Small Modular Reactors.  

We walk through these alternatives, examine how public markets are valuing them today, and end where every cycle eventually leads us: Are we in a bubble? 
Or, as Chuck Prince, then CEO of Citigroup, famously put it on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis:
“As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

Luca Pedretti, Co-Founder, Pexapark, returns to discuss how volatility, market design, and new contract structures are transforming power markets and renewable economics. What begins with PPA pricing quickly evolves into a broader conversation about where value is now created in the clean energy system.

We start with the growing importance of IFRS 13 fair value accounting. In increasingly volatile markets, long-term forecasts are no longer sufficient. Market-implied PPA prices are moving faster than fundamentals and are becoming a key signal for future capture rates and risk, forcing investors to reassess how renewable assets are valued.

The discussion then turns to Flexibility Purchase Agreements (FPAs), including tolls and floors for batteries. FPAs reflect a fundamental shift from generation toward flexibility and optimisation, as renewable-heavy systems face cannibalisation, negative prices, and widening price spreads.

With clean sources now accounting for nearly half of EU power generation, these side effects are becoming structural. Solar capture rates have dropped sharply in markets such as Germany, negative prices now occur in thousands of hours across Europe, and curtailment and balancing costs are rising. Batteries have become the system’s primary response.

We also explore how the buyer landscape is shifting. Hyperscalers and data centres are increasingly driving private PPAs, utilities are regaining relevance through trading and optimisation, and stand-alone renewable PPAs are showing signs of saturation. Despite this, capital deployment across clean energy continues to grow, signalling a reallocation of value rather than a slowdown.

The conversation concludes with a look ahead. Many renewable assets financed under merchant assumptions are now misaligned with today’s pricing reality. Battery tolls and floors are scaling quickly, consolidation among IPPs is accelerating, and capture rates remain unstable. The open question remains whether any buyers are willing to pay a green premium for co-located and hybrid projects in a market where flexibility has become central to value creation.

Link to Pexapark reports
IPPs:
https://go.pexapark.com/next-gen-ipp-playbook

Renewables Market Outlook 2026 - The Big Repricing: How volatility and BESS reshape clean energy markets (PPAs and FPAs): 

https://pexapark.com/pexapark-renewables-market-outlook-2026/

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