Earlier this year, a man told me that what I work on felt like “Mars vs Venus”. He likely meant that looking at trust, fairness, vulnerability, belonging, or lived experience was superficial. Emotional. Decorative. Something you might add once the “real work” was done.
I remember the comment because it was so revealing. Not (so) offensive, just intellectually thin. And because 2025 made something very clear: this way of thinking is no longer just outdated. It is actively dangerous for the energy transition.
What was dismissed as “soft” now sits at the centre of performance, resilience, and credibility. What was framed as peripheral now determines whether projects scale, whether policies hold, whether investments last, and whether people stay on board when change becomes uncomfortable.
That is the lens through which I read 2025.
We spent much of 2025 debating whether citizens and businesses were losing appetite for the energy transition. The narrative suggested hesitation or fatigue with climate ambition. This reading never aligned with what I observed across the year — in policy rooms, municipal offices, innovation spaces, or in the conversations I host on the Energ’ Ethic podcast. People want a resilient, fair, and affordable transition. They want a system that treats them with intelligence and dignity. They want coherence.
In Paris, after a session on what it meant, concretely, to build a right to energy, someone told me something that stayed with me. They said that people support renewable energy — a IFOP surveys confirm this — yet they struggle to recognise the positive impact of the transition on their electricity bills. Their values and their daily signals do not align. A global study published in Nature Climate Change, conducted with UNDP, revealed a similar pattern: 80 to 89 percent of people worldwide want stronger climate action, yet most believe they are in the minority. This “supermajority illusion” creates a false sense of division and unnecessary silence.
The comment in Paris captured a broader truth. Europe wants the transition. People need institutions that translate that collective intention into daily clarity and confidence. Investors need long-term readability. This gap shaped much of 2025.
The transition advances through ambition, but it becomes real through consistency, fairness, and credibility. Trust — or misstrust — becomes the organising principle.
Trust supports resilience — financial, social, political, and emotional. Trust anchors the decisions we need to take.
Or make them sink.
This is why trust will shape the energy transition in 2026.
The Real Lessons of 2025
1. Progress Collides With Believability
2025 delivered strong technical momentum. Renewables accounted for more than 90 percent of new global power capacity added. Solar reached historical highs. Many countries refined their climate and energy strategies. These trends show a system able to scale technologies at a remarkable speed.
Yet people do not live in frameworks or deployment curves. They live in homes, cities, workplaces, and budgets.
They ask whether renovation rules come with support (not only financial). Whether tariffs remain understandable. Whether digitalisation respects autonomy. Whether institutions stay present when implementation becomes difficult.
Ambition moves fast. Believability moves more slowly.
That gap shapes trust. Trust shapes resilience. Resilience determines whether the transition holds under pressure.
This paradox sits at the centre of 2025: Europe holds a collective intention to act. The daily experience of the transition does not always reflect that intention.
Trust grows when ambition and experience align. Trust weakens when they drift apart.
2. Cooling Raised New Questions — Even If the Momentum Remains Thin
Cooling and summer energy poverty appeared only lightly in policy discussions this year. The topic has not yet reached the level of visibility that matches the scale of the challenge. Many institutions still see overheating as a marginal issue, and the conversation often remains secondary to winter energy poverty or building renovation. The momentum is fragile and uneven.
Yet something shifted. Through my research and advisory work, I saw people begin to recognise the implications of extreme heat in a new way. For several organisations and individuals I met, this was an eye-opening moment. They connected overheating with health, affordability, urban form, and inequality. They saw the links between climate adaptation and the emotional experience of resilience in the home. They began to consider cooling not as a lifestyle matter, but as a structural dimension of vulnerability.
This is still early. The landscape has not transformed. But the questions are now on the table — questions about how buildings, cities, and energy systems respond to a warming climate, and how resilience must guide the next phase of transition governance.
Cooling is a small but significant indicator of a broader inconsistency in 2025: people feel the risks of summer heat more directly than the systems designed to protect them. Appetite for adaptation is growing through lived experience. Institutional action has not yet caught up.
This mismatch reveals the next frontier for resilience, fairness, and trust.
3. Where Ambition Meets Reality
Europe holds an ambitious climate and energy framework. The expectations placed on local authorities, DSOs, cooperatives, housing providers, SMEs, and NGOs continue to grow. These actors coordinate obligations that require planning, sequencing, and clarity. Their work gives the transition its operational shape. They carry the responsibility for decisions that citizens experience most directly.
A structural inconsistency appears when ambition expands faster than the systems that must deliver it. Governance gaps reduce predictability. Fragmented responsibilities complicate long-term planning. Workloads intensify while support structures remain uneven. These pressures shape how communities interpret the transition and how institutions earn or lose trust.
Finance reinforces the same tension. When rules weaken or fluctuate, responsible companies must compete with actors that operate under lower standards. Communities then absorb environmental and social costs, while the climate carries the delay. Investors increasingly ask for certainty instead of promises. They seek verifiable origin, transparent sourcing, and robust ESG performance across solar, storage, and broader clean-tech supply chains. They want to know where a panel or a battery was produced, under which labour and environmental conditions, and whether procurement frameworks reflect the values Europe claims to uphold.
Implementation becomes a test of resilience.
Clear roles, stable rules, and credible oversight strengthen the capacity of organisations to plan, invest, and cooperate. Institutions build trust when systems support those who deliver change rather than stretching them beyond their limits.
Resilient transitions emerge from environments where ambition and action move in step, and where standards, governance, and financing reinforce each other instead of pulling in opposite directions. This alignment forms the decisive frontier for 2026.
When Assumptions Finally Broke Open
My clearest moment of insight this year came in a room full of entrepreneurs. They discussed barriers to deployment with impressive technical fluency. Their language changed when the conversation turned to affordability, agency, comprehension, and the emotional demands of adaptation. The atmosphere shifted when someone finally said: “Maybe we’re building tools no one can use.”
That sentence captured what the “Mars vs Venus” comment never understood. It revealed a cultural shift. Adoption, trust, and resilience decide outcomes. Systems fail when people cannot hold them. Projects stall when they ignore how life is actually lived. Transition tools need to make sense in people’s lives. They need to reinforce resilience rather than create new vulnerabilities.
What some dismiss as “soft” governs risk, uptake, and durability. Fairness stabilises systems. Agency accelerates adoption. Cooling resilience protects health. Governance clarity protects investment. Dialogue prevents breakdown.
This is not decoration. This is system design.
Human insight strengthens implementation. Fairness strengthens stability. Agency strengthens adoption. Cooling resilience strengthens public health and safety. Governance clarity strengthens financial performance. Dialogue strengthens long-term cooperation.
These are not decorative elements. They form the operating system of a resilient transition.
The Core Principle of the Transition
The energy transition succeeds when institutions, businesses, and communities rebuild the trust that allows people to move through change with dignity, agency, clarity, and resilience.
Everything else relies on this foundation.
How to Build Transitions People Believe In
What To Do If You Want Trust to Grow
1. Treat justice and climate adaptation as structural constraints
Cooling resilience, vulnerability analysis, and affordability belong at the beginning of every strategy. These elements guide feasibility and point to pressure zones. They reinforce long-term resilience.
2. Bring governance clarity forward
Clear roles, predictable responsibilities, and structured support create stability. People need to understand who carries which decisions and how the system responds under stress.
3. Create structured spaces for disagreement and repair
Dialogue strengthens legitimacy. People stay engaged when they feel heard. Structured conversations anticipate conflict and reduce long-term risks. These spaces reinforce institutional resilience.
If You Need a Steady Hand for 2026
2026 will reward organisations that align ambition with resilience, justice with strategy, and technical excellence with social intelligence. It will reward institutions that treat adaptation and fairness as core pillars. It will reward leaders who invest in trust.
If your organisation is preparing strategic decisions on vulnerability, cooling resilience, governance, stakeholder engagement, affordability, or public trust, I would be glad to work with you. My work brings together policy insight, research, qualitative intelligence, narrative clarity, and dialogue. It strengthens transitions that support people and endure stress.
This is the work the years ahead require.
