Redefining Energy

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:US oil production down in 2025 (MB — bold, brave… wrong)
Oil at $40/bbl in 2025 (GR — oof)
Geopolitics + broken supply chains + energy chaos = a better, more innovative world (LS — still hoping)
A bloodbath for hydrogen in transportation (MB — disturbingly accurate)
Record installs: Solar 700GW, EVs 20m, Batteries 200GWh (spot on)
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.