“A portfolio is only as valuable as our ability to integrate it” – Dr Angela Wilkinson Opening Keynote 2026 LDES Council
6 October, Madrid:
Good morning.
I was told this is a working meeting rather than a typical conference.
Good.
Because there is plenty to work on.
And I want to start further upstream from long-duration energy storage – with one of the defining shifts in world energy today.
The global electrification surge.
Electricity demand is growing and changing.
Driven by active demand, decarbonisation and digitalisation.
Regional electrification is becoming important to delivering climate goals and energy security, industrial competitiveness and human development.
And as more of our economies and societies depend on electricity, the quality of the system matters as much as its size.
Here in Madrid, we hardly need reminding of that.
Last year’s Iberian blackout was not a simple story with a single cause. The final investigation points to interacting factors across voltage control, generation, system operation and coordination.
The lesson is bigger than any one company, country or technology.
As electrification accelerates and intensifies, resilience depends increasingly on how the parts of a wider system work as a whole.
The future needs more clean electricity and fuels.
And the quality of the connections between technologies, operators and systems matters as much as the quantity of assets we add.
Adding smarter electrification needs grids, connections and water. It needs system-wide resilience and collective intelligence.
And, increasingly, it needs flexibility.
So, my first proposition is simple.
The global electrification surge creates a new premium on flexibility – and on our ability to integrate and orchestrate it.
At the World Energy Council, we call the leadership response: Rebalancing Now.
Because energy systems are continuously balancing more things.
Abundance and affordability.
Access and sustainability.
Reliability and resilience.
Increasingly intelligent systems economies are being shaped by new energy choices about shifting trade-offs and new interdependencies.
And this is where storage gets interesting.
Storage is moving from the margins towards core system capability.
And it is scaling and diversifying at extraordinary speed in some places.
Look at China.
Battery storage has already overtaken pumped hydro in installed power capacity, and new-type energy storage continued to grow rapidly in 2025.
Average equivalent utilisation hours nearly doubled between 2023 and last year.
That is extraordinary scaling. But the more interesting signal is not just speed and scale.
The portfolio is widening.
Compressed-air storage has reached commercial operation, while other long-duration options, including molten-salt storage, are moving through demonstration towards deployment.
And the lessons I take from China’s delivery at scale are two-fold: Integration. AND. Interoperability.
Because an increasingly electrified world needs energy flexibility across different places, timescales and uses.
Seconds and hours. Days and seasons.
For heating and cooling.
Carried by electrons and molecules.
As this room knows better than most, LDES is already a portfolio of solutions, timescales and uses.
So perhaps the more interesting question is what we do with that portfolio.
Long duration is a category. Right duration, right technology, right place is a market design question.
And the more diverse the portfolio becomes, the more important integration becomes.
A portfolio is only as valuable as our ability to integrate it.
Storage has to integrate with generation and grids.
Industrial processes and data centres.
Electricity and heat.
Markets and digital control systems.
Which is why I believe integration and interoperability are becoming defining capabilities of an increasingly electrified world.
Interoperability is technical.
Can different assets, grids, human and digital control systems work together?