Welcome to our April newsletter! Estimated 3 min read

Friends and colleagues,

Spring is in full swing, and we celebrated Earth Day yesterday by reflecting on what the theme “Our Power, Our Planet” means in practice.

Because, as we all know from experience, collective action doesn’t just spontaneously happen when we share a room together. It has to be cultivated, which is rarely easy in the complex world of energy and infrastructure.

Building “Our Power" means ensuring a wide range of voices from across the ecosystem are at the table. It means helping people feel comfortable enough to move past their talking points and engage with real-world conflicts and constraints. And it means having a shared story – the common thread that inspires and aligns us so we can actually solve problems together.

With this in mind we are thrilled to launch two new summits in London this May and June, co-produced with institutional and research partners at the forefront of the energy transition. Both events are focused on building our collective capacity to accelerate electrification and clean energy in the UK, Europe, and beyond: putting “Our Power, Our Planet” into practice.

Onward!

Susan Kish, CEO & Jonah Wagner, President

Energy After Fire: a provocative, optimistic new energy summit coming to London

The energy shocks of Ukraine and the Iran war have made one thing undeniable: energy security is a first-order political and economic concern. 

But the dominant narrative of slow progress, insuperable barriers, and fossil dependency as far as the eye can see is a misreading of where the world is actually heading.

The reality is sharply different. Renewables and electrification are dominating new energy supply. A new industrial era, defined by technologies that allow us to “borrow” energy, rather than burning fuels, is under way.

Energy After Fire is a half-day, invite-only summit at London Climate Action Week on 23 June, bringing together the builders, investors, public-sector enablers, and thinkers driving the electrotech revolution.

The summit is organized in partnership with Ember, a leading energy thinktank, as well as Catalyse Europe, Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology, Global Renewables Alliance, and Centre for Net Zero, and will be hosted at Octopus Energy’s colorful headquarters in London.

The program revolves around expert provocations designed to spark meaningful debate, followed by facilitated discussion on three topics:

• Building the electrotech future — where the greatest opportunities are, who's leading, and what comes next

• The geopolitics of the energy transition — how electrification is reshaping energy security and the new winners and losers

• The emerging market leapfrog — why developing economies are outpacing developed ones in electrotech deployment

Spots are limited and by invitation only for this inaugural event. If you're interested in attending, please contact emma@constructive.org.

Meeting the Demand Surge: The inaugural WRI Polsky Energy Summit

Constructive is proud to be facilitating the inaugural WRI Polsky Energy Summit in London on 21 May.

If energy security is today’s top priority, meeting surging demand is a close (and closely related) second.

Clean energy represents our best opportunity to meet this demand quickly, reliably, and affordably – but no single actor can tackle this alone. That's the challenge this summit is built around.

Senior global leaders, from energy, finance, business, regulation, and international organizations, will convene at the University of Chicago Booth School's London Conference Centre for a full day of solutions-focused work.

Most of the day will be structured around small “solutions groups” where participants will work through shared challenges and build concrete action agendas to take forward, with our CEO Susan Kish guiding the discussion and synthesizing outcomes. 

This summit is invite-only. If you'd like to register your interest please contact emma@constructive.org.

Constructive at CERAWeek

CERAWeek was abuzz with talk about the impacts of the war in Iran, as well as persistent questions around AI and load growth. Against this backdrop, clean, homegrown, firm power – especially geothermal – continued to gain momentum.

Our Senior Fellow Mike O’Connor spoke on a panel about geothermal business models, exploring how to structure projects to manage subsurface risk, high upfront drilling costs, and long development timelines — and how creative public policy can catalyze commercial liftoff. 

Mike is leading our work with the Center for Public Enterprise to accelerate geothermal development in the Mountain West – more on this next month.

Meanwhile, Susan moderated panels on the role of cities and regions in workforce development, and the importance of cross-sector collaboration in accelerating the timeline between tech breakthrough and real-world impact. She also interviewed William McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle – more on this in our reading recommendations, and you can watch the video here.

Finally, our new US Program Director Jake Wellman met with partners scaling clean energy technologies throughout the week to share lessons learned and explore areas for collaboration.

We’re starting a new section to share our favorite data visualizations that we’ve come across during the month! 

This month: a chart from Axios showing that data center spending is now rivaling investments in renewables, oil, and gas, with major implications for power demand and emissions.

Per Rystad Energy, authors of the original report: “Solar PV investments, broadly acknowledged as the most substantial growth story in energy supply over the past 10 years, had already been eclipsed by data centers in 2024.”

If you have recommendations for this section - or indeed for other things to read and listen to that we can share in the section below - we would love to hear them.

• Jake is reading “Financing the Missing Middle”, a new collection of essays from the Council for Foreign Relations addressing the $100-$200 billion gap in private funding for energy innovation in the US. The core issue, as ever, is risk; solutions include innovative methods of transferring risk and public-private partnership.

• Susan is rereading Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough – a pioneering book that argues that waste is not inevitable, but the result of poor design, materials choices and lifecycle planning. First published in 2002, Cradle to Cradle is more relevant than ever, challenging the assumption that progress must come at the planet’s expense.

• Rosie just started reading The Good Earth, a novel set in pre-revolutionary China about a farmer and his wife, and their connection to the land. Its writer, Pearl S. Buck, was the first female author to win a Nobel Prize in Literature and a prominent activist and humanitarian.

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