Flexibility in the Age of Energy Volatility
The hosts:
Mariana Costa, EDP Ventures
Rokas Peciulaitis, Contrarian Ventures
What is this Ripple about?
This Ripple explores how flexibility can help power systems absorb market, renewable, and geopolitical volatility while strengthening energy security and resilience. We will treat flexibility not only as a decarbonization tool but as critical infrastructure in its own right, and look at who is building real businesses on the back of volatility.
Why this topic timely or urgent in 2026
As power systems become more dependent on variable renewables and globally exposed supply chains, volatility is no longer episodic, it is structural. In 2026, flexibility has emerged as a critical tool for maintaining reliability, managing price shocks, and strengthening energy security amid geopolitical uncertainty. The tools themselves are reshaping the risk picture: flexibility increasingly runs on millions of connected, largely standardized devices, built by a handful of OEMs and exposed to the internet. The same fleet that absorbs volatility is becoming the grid's newest attack surface. Meanwhile, governments have started budgeting storage and flexibility as strategic national infrastructure rather than as energy transition line items.
Key questions or challenges being explored
How can power systems build enough flexibility to integrate growing shares of renewables while maintaining reliability and affordability?
What role should storage, demand response, interconnection, and market design play in managing both market and geopolitical volatility?
How can countries strengthen energy security and resilience without slowing the pace of decarbonization?
Volatility is already a business model. Who captures it: utilities, established trading houses, or vertically integrated newcomers, from traders with their own weather models and stacks to operators that finance, own and run flexibility assets for the largest C&I energy users?
Flexibility runs on millions of standardized, internet-connected devices. How do we keep the grid's biggest new resource from becoming its biggest vulnerability?
The key tension or debate at the heart of this discussion
The central tension is between accelerating decarbonization through increasingly interconnected, renewable-based power systems and maintaining energy security in a more volatile geopolitical environment. As grids become cleaner and more electrified, they also become more dependent on flexible infrastructure, critical minerals, cross-border supply chains, market coordination, and millions of connected devices, raising questions about resilience, cyber exposure, sovereignty, affordability, and strategic autonomy.
Who would get the most value from attending this Ripple?
Energy and climate investors, grid and utility executives, clean-tech startups, corporate energy buyers, energy traders and flexibility providers, policymakers, and infrastructure innovators working at the intersection of power systems, storage, electrification, and energy security. It should be particularly relevant for decision-makers exploring how flexibility, market design, and resilient infrastructure can create competitive advantage in an increasingly volatile and geopolitically complex energy landscape.