THE DROP x Energy minds

The grid is now the rate limiter for both economic growth and climate progress. Energy underpins everything—industry, transport, digital infrastructure—but the bottleneck isn’t only how to create energy, it’s the wires, substations, and market structures that move and balance it.

Baseload still matters. From advanced geothermal to next-generation nuclear and soon fusion, reliable 24/7 generation is arriving faster than expected. At the same time, the price of solar and wind is dropping to almost free, but intermittent and unreliable. How will we be able to add more baseload, or energy storage, into aging, congested grids is with a slow, politically complex, and capital-intensive enviroment.

Energy remains the world’s largest source of emissions and a driver of geopolitical conflict. Control over oil, gas, and critical minerals shapes wars, trade disputes, and national strategies. Shifting to cleaner, more distributed sources will not remove these dynamics unless the grid itself is modernised.

This track will explore the grid as the largest collaborative machine and market humanity has ever built—and the real constraint on decarbonisation. We’ll examine base load scaling, capacity market economics, resilience in a high-renewable mix, and investable wedges in orchestration, flexibility, and distributed integration. Expect deep dives on regulatory leverage points, new asset finance models, and the software layers at the grid edge where both returns and resilience will emerge in the decade ahead.