Last week, European power industry leaders and policymakers gathered in Helsinki for Eurelectric’s Power Summit 2026 to discuss the sector’s most pressing challenges, including AI’s complicated relationship with the power sector, industrial electrification, and supply and infrastructure security.
Energy systems are facing unprecedented threats. We’re seeing a massive spike in power demand, driven largely by data centers and industrial electrification; navigating a volatile geopolitical landscape and with it, having to secure reliable, independent supply and defend critical infrastructure against emerging hybrid attacks; and all this with increasing pressures to both decarbonise and digitalise.
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So, what needs to be done to ensure Europe’s competitiveness on the global stage?
This episode is hosted by Jackie Park, editor-in-chief of GlobalData’s energy titles, and features insights from:
- Alexander Stubb, President of Finland
- Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist at Ember
- Rory Stewart, Co-host of The Rest is Politics
- Jan Rosenow, Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at the University of Oxford
- Oonagh Buckley, Secretary General of Ireland’s Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment
- Miguel G. Torreira, Global Lead for Commodity Markets at Accenture
- Ralf Blumenthal, SVP Europe at Siemens Grid Software
- Kristian Ruby, Secretary General at Eurelectric
- Urs Pennanen, SVP of Corporate Customers at Fortum
- Linda-Maria Wadman, CCO of Plexigrid
- Talal Eskandar, Executive Managing Director at Reactive Technologies Limited
- Mircea Stremtan, Sales Director at SentryOT
Industrial electrification
Europe’s power mix is already heavily decarbonised, but clean electricity isn’t being taken up quickly enough – especially in industry, where electrification economics are still uneven across regions.
“Europe has amongst the world’s highest electricity prices… and in large part, as a result of those high prices, we have had stagnant electrification in Europe for a generation,” says Bond.
“We essentially have the technologies to electrify; what we need is better orchestration. We need a mindset shift on the side of the industrials,” says Ruby.
Supply security and geopolitical resilience
The conversation on security has widened from fuel dependency to something more strategic: sovereignty, industrial autonomy, and resilience in a world where alliances and supply chains can’t be taken for granted. At the same time, leaders warn that hostile activity against energy infrastructure is no longer hypothetical – hybrid threats are already playing out across Europe.
“Energy is now increasingly about sovereignty. We’ve thought about it obviously in terms of Russia, and in terms of China… but we now have to increasingly think about it in relation to the United States. What we’ve discovered is that we have created all these dependencies,” says Stewart.
“The accelerated trend in digitalisation, together, with the geopolitical context of today, raises high threats of cybersecurity on energy infrastructure,” says Stremtan.
AI in power: threat or opportunity?
AI is a double-edged sword for the power industry: it is burdening grids with exponential demand but also promises optimisation across the power value chain. So, is AI a bigger threat or opportunity for the sector?
“Every quarter we ask more than 3,600 executives around the world what they think about this topic… and here is what they are telling us. First, investment in AI is indeed real. More than 80% of executives confirm that, and it’s actually growing. Second, AI is becoming much more an investment and a bet on growth than actually a cost rate, more than or nearly 80% of executives see AI as more beneficial to revenue than cost. So the investment is real, and the direction of travel is clear,” says Torreira.
Lessons from Nordic energy systems
Hosting this year’s summit in Finland is an opportunity to spotlight the Nordic energy transition. We asked what lessons the rest of Europe can learn from them.
“A consistent operating environment is very important… We’ve been decarbonising electricity production and generation in the Nordics and in Finland over the decades. We didn’t do it in the last two years; we’ve done it in the last 50 years,” says Pennanen.
“We have been very early with digitalisation… and this is really the foundation that it builds upon,” says Wadman.
Optimism for the future
President Stubb said: “There’s a really stupid saying in the Finnish language, and that is that a pessimist will never be disappointed. I want to turn that around – that an optimist will live a hell of a lot more fun life.”
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