Notes from Reuters' Global Energy Transition 2025 Event This Week

Takeaways from the 7 sessions I moderated this week. Spoiler alert: the clock has run out on "eventually"

Hi everyone,

I spent Wednesday and Thursday this week moderating sessions at the Reuters Global Energy Transition summit in New York. Not only was there a very engaged audience on the ground, but 2 million people watched the global broadcast of Day 1 alone, illustrating once again how energy is at the tip of everyone’s tongue right now.

Just about every conversation left me with the same takeaway: The growing demand for energy is an urgent hockey stick, not a gentle slope. Siemens’ Jim Taylor gave us the perfect Cliff’s Notes on the background of this:

“From the 50s through the 90s, demand kept growing for utilities, so utilities couldn’t spend more than was required because they had new customers coming all the time. So the grid was easy to build, when there were problems we just overbuilt it and moved on. Then we plateaued and that was really driven by energy efficiency programs at the federal level. That started lowering demand.

And now all of a sudden we have this big hockey stick again of increased demand. The demand’s driven in 3 areas: re-onshoring of manufacturing, EVs rolling out, and big data centers.”

Below, you’ll find some of my takeaways from the sessions I moderated. And you can watch all sessions from this event free on Reuters LinkedIn page here.

The Nuclear Renaissance Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

Paging

Doomberg

… who’s been banging this drum for a long time.

For years, nuclear was the energy sector’s third rail: politically toxic, economically uncertain, and stuck in decades-old perceptions. But if there’s one thing this year’s summit made clear, it’s that the mood has changed. And fast.

Leigh Curyer, CEO of NexGen, said: “I’ve been in the industry since 2002, and I’ve never witnessed until the last 12 months, such universal global support for nuclear energy.”

Sam Stockdale (Managing Director, Energy & Sustainability, Link Logistics) agreed: “Energy density is king right now and nukes are a clear pathway to provide dispatchable power that is dense.”

The reason nuclear is back on the table is simple: demand (isn’t it always!). Whether it’s the energy load from AI development, manufacturing reshoring, or electrification, the system needs dense, reliable, carbon-free baseload, and nuclear is, increasingly, one of the only things that fits.

As an example, NexGen’s upcoming Rook I mine in Saskatchewan will provide 20% of the world’s uranium supply. That’s enough to power 46 million US homes annually.

Even small modular reactors (SMRs), long stuck in the realm of pilot projects, are gaining traction. They’re still years away, but the will to make them work is now there. “Populations need efficient, low-cost power to prosper,” said Leigh. “And it’s unfolding a lot faster than we anticipated.”

AI Is Eating the World

Source: FabriXAI

AI came up in almost every session, not as a shiny new add-on, but as something much deeper. As Anurag Sahay, Chief Technology Officer Data and AI at Nagarro, put it, we’ve moved from predictive AI (version 1.0) to something closer to agentic AI: systems that can simulate, reason, iterate, and adapt in real-time.

Marissa Mar, Chief Commercial Strategist at Chevron Power Solutions also flagged agentic AI: “The wave of AI innovation is very real. We’re in the early days of agentic AI, and so much compute is required for this… We can’t just sit there and think things will figure themselves out, while China is aggressively pursuing the race towards AGI.”

AI is becoming infrastructure: shaping demand forecasting, grid simulations, maintenance workflows, even code deployment itself. “What used to be point interventions,” Anurag said, “are now end-to-end intelligent workflows.” AI isn’t just optimizing the system. In many places, it is the system.

And that means that the quality of the data is paramount. Joseph Dutton, Energy Innovation Lead, AXIS Insurance said: “How good is your data - that shapes the future. The more data you have on your fingertips, the better you can predict and project.”

And perhaps most importantly, Anurag flipped the usual ROI question on its head: “Don’t ask, ‘What’s the return on this?’ Ask, ‘What’s the downside of not doing this?’ Because in a few months, the differential will be too much.”

Climate Is the Reason We’re Building Renewables (And the Reason They Might Break)

The energy transition has always had a climate rationale. But climate change is now putting new energy infrastructure at risk, Joseph Dutton said.

Renewables have longer, slower paybacks than traditional energy. That makes them more dependent on insurance to de-risk investment. But the pace of climate change is catching up (and in some cases, overtaking) the transition itself. “Renewable projects are being damaged by the climate change they’re being built to combat,” he said.

Case in point: solar. The Midwest has huge solar potential, but it’s also in what the insurance industry calls the “hail belt.” Hailstones several inches across have already damaged thousands of panels, and insurers are now scrambling to adapt. Add in wildfires, flooding, and extreme heat, and you start to see how exposed the system is.

There’s a deeper point here too. Insurance sits in a unique position: not just reacting to risk, but helping define what’s even possible. “If something’s not insurable, it’s not investable,” Joseph said. As more capital flows into renewables — over $2 trillion last year alone — the insurance lens is becoming one of the most important in the entire system.

All that said, there is huge development happening in renewables. Joseph said: “The pace of the energy transition is accelerating: in the last 2 years, the world has built more solar capacity than it did in the previous 50 years.”

The Grid Is the Bottleneck

The grid — aging, overloaded, and under-digitized — is fast becoming the limiting factor for everything from AI to EVs.

Chevron’s Marissa Mar said: “Even before this AI-driven demand spike, it was widely accepted that we’d need billions, if not trillions, to upgrade the grid. Now, that urgency is very, very real.”

Sam Stockdale pointed out that the real estate sector is undergoing a quiet energy revolution of its own. Industrial buildings, traditionally powered at 2 watts per square foot, are now pushing toward 10–15 watts per square foot due to electrification and automation. That’s a step change in demand, and the grid isn’t ready.

As I mentioned earlier, Jim Taylor of Siemens laid out the historical context: in the mid-century boom, utilities just built more infrastructure as demand rose. But then demand plateaued, thanks to efficiency standards. Now? “We’re back in a hockey-stick curve of demand,” he said. “But this time, utilities aren’t set up to respond. Adding a generator takes 10 years. We can’t build our way out.”

The answer, according to Jim, has to involve software: smart grids, autonomous controls, digital demand management. But most utilities are still playing catch-up. And hyperscalers don’t want to wait. “They care about connection speed, not cost,” he said. “And utilities care about cost, not speed. Those two worlds don’t talk to each other.”

The Clock Has Run Out on “Eventually”

If there was one undercurrent running through every session, it was this: timelines have collapsed.

Whether it was Chevron’s move to secure GE’s turbines for gas-powered data center projects, or the acknowledgment that hyperscalers are already buying future energy at premium prices, everyone seemed to agree: the future isn’t something to plan for anymore. It’s something to catch up to.

SLB’s Gavin Rennick framed it as a shift from “being tech-driven” to “fixing customer problems.” That sounds simple, but when your customers are facing unprecedented demand, climate risk, and regulatory complexity all at once, it becomes a different kind of game.

Even the insurance industry, often seen as slow-moving by design, is now rethinking its models and priorities to keep pace. And that may be the biggest signal of all: when the people who bet on risk are accelerating, you know things are moving.

Gavin Rennick, (President New Energy, SLB) offered a concrete and pretty damn cool example of just how fast things are changing and the remarkable innovation taking place. “We’ve been working for three years and have built a scaled solution for critical minerals and the development of lithium from brine,” he said. “Yesterday, we were awarded most sustainable lithium producer on the planet.” That’s not just a pivot — that’s execution under pressure. And in this cycle, execution is what separates headlines from impact.

Whew…! Massive, urgent demand, incredible innovation, and industries working together to figure it out. Not a bad time to be in the energy game, eh?

Maggie

Important Disclaimer: It is crucial to remember that this article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Consult with a qualified financial advisor to assess your risk tolerance, investment goals, and overall financial plan.