Corporate innovators are entering a new phase of the energy transition, one shaped less by broad ambition and more by practical realities. That theme ran consistently through Climate First’s annual Strategics Forum, hosted with Honda and Taylor Wessing , where 40+ corporate senior leaders across energy, mobility, utilities, and industrials gathered to compare notes on how the transition is unfolding inside their organisations.
Net Zero Insights partnered with Climate First to survey the participants during the event. In line with the discussions, the results reveal a clear mood: the transition is not slowing, but the logic guiding corporate decisions is evolving. Strategics are reordering priorities, revisiting timelines, and increasingly concentrating resources on technologies that can withstand macro uncertainty and deliver tangible, system-level value.
What stands out first is what hasn’t changed. The energy transition remains central for nearly all respondents, an immovable feature of long-term competitiveness. But beneath that surface consensus lies a more complex reality: the transition is advancing at different speeds within different organisations, depending on how directly it affects near-term commercial performance. For some, it defines capital budgeting; for others, it’s a long-term directional anchor competing with today’s operational pressures.
This tension becomes clearer when looking at how strategics interpret the current macro environment.
Few corporates are retreating from the transition, but many are recalibrating. Higher interest rates, volatile policy environments, and uneven global incentive signals have not reversed strategic commitments—but they have raised the bar for what qualifies as an “investable” climate technology. The result is a more disciplined posture: longer diligence cycles, greater scrutiny of business models and market demand, and an emphasis on technologies that can mature within existing capital constraints.
This shift is visible in how strategics prioritise the next 12 months.
Rather than spreading attention across a broad set of categories, respondents gravitated toward the same cluster of system-critical technologies: renewables, storage, grid and electrification infrastructure, and industrial decarbonisation. These are not the most novel areas—they are the ones where commercial models have stabilised, regulatory signals are clearer, and deployment timelines match corporate planning cycles. In other words, corporates are now placing bets where the transition is already accelerating, not where it might accelerate eventually.
The constraints strategics cite are not surprising, but their frequency is telling. Technology maturity remains a core challenge, especially for hardware-heavy categories. Internal bandwidth is tight, making it difficult to evaluate emerging solutions or structure partnerships. Regulatory uncertainty continues to slow investment committees. Access to patient capital remains limited outside major corporations. None of these issues are new; what’s new is that corporates are increasingly shaping their strategy around them.
This explains the themes that appear when respondents look ahead to 2026.
Utilities pointed to nuclear, grid optimisation, and AI-driven data-centre cooling, reflecting their focus on reliability as electrification accelerates. Oil and gas respondents emphasised full-system electrification as well as CCUS-adjacent and AI-enabling technologies. Heavy industry highlighted energy-related solutions, while mobility leaders pointed to resource circulation, particularly in batteries. Taken together, the pattern remains consistent: corporates are scaling mature solutions today while exploring a smaller set of deeper technologies that will address tomorrow’s system constraints.
What emerged clearly at the Forum is that several high-profile technologies have struggled because supply has outpaced real demand. Hydrogen was one of the most cited examples. Green hydrogen developers built capacity and solutions in anticipation of entirely new markets, yet adoption has lagged because the strongest near-term opportunity remains the existing grey hydrogen market in applications like fertiliser production. This kind of disconnect is shaping how corporates adjust their expectations. Instead of chasing the next breakthrough, they are concentrating on technologies that address immediate bottlenecks such as reliability, load growth, and system capacity.
This marks a broader shift in corporate climate strategy. The early phase of the transition was driven by targets, narratives, and exploratory investment. The next phase is grounded in fundamentals and shaped by operational bottlenecks, system capacity, and stricter prioritisation. Corporates are focusing less on what appears transformative on paper and more on what can deliver reliable impact within the constraints of today’s energy and industrial systems.
Corporates remain committed, but the pattern of engagement is changing. They are concentrating on a smaller set of technologies where they have higher conviction and shifting attention away from novelty toward solutions that deliver measurable system impact.
In that sense, the transition is not slowing. It is maturing. And the organisations that succeed in this next chapter will be the ones that not only adopt climate technologies, but also navigate the constraints that determine how and how fast those technologies can scale.
