Recently, we relaunched the b2venture Expert Roundtable, a recurring online format that brings together our angel community, founders, operators, and industry experts to discuss the themes shaping our investment theses.

For this first session following the relaunch, we turned to one of Europe's most consequential challenges: energy sovereignty. The question is no longer whether Europe will restructure its energy system, but how fast and at what cost. That transition, away from fossil fuel dependence and toward domestic, low-carbon alternatives, is creating genuine gaps in infrastructure, software, and hardware that incumbents alone cannot fill.

Joining us were Philipp Schröder, Founder & CEO of 1KOMMA5°; Prof. Dr. Rolf Wüstenhagen from the University of St. Gallen; Philipp Engelkamp, Founder of Telura; and Daniel Seidel, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of LiveEO. Their perspectives spanned energy production, grid infrastructure, supply chains, and physical resilience. Here are their main theses.

“The problem is not generation, it is synchronization” (Philipp Schröder, 1KOMMA5°)

The numbers tell a compelling story. Global energy transition investment has grown nearly 50% since the 2022 crisis, reaching USD 2.3 trillion in 2025. In Germany alone, renewable energy's share of electricity generation has risen from 46% to 59%, while coal has been reduced from 32% to 21%. In Switzerland, solar generation doubled its share from 7% to 14% in just three years.

For Philipp Schröder, however, the central challenge of the next decade is not producing more renewable energy but making better use of what is already being generated. Today, electricity transport costs account for 40% of total electricity expenses for consumers. The culprit is a fundamental mismatch between when and where energy is generated and when and where it is consumed. Renewable capacity is increasingly abundant; the grid's ability to route and balance it intelligently is not.

Schröder's thesis is that smart flexibility (coordinating distributed, steerable assets like batteries, heat pumps, and electric vehicles) can solve this without laying new copper. He estimates that intelligent synchronization of these devices across Europe could save EUR 255 billion that would otherwise be spent on physical grid infrastructure. 1KOMMA5°'s Heartbeat AI platform has already passed 1 GW of shiftable load, enabling households to shift consumption to periods of peak renewable generation and reduce their electricity bills by 70–80%.

A critical regulatory enabler is approaching: Germany will shift to a free-market model on January 1, 2027, exempting batteries from grid fees and moving away from static feed-in tariffs. For founders and investors in the flexibility and virtual power plant space, this is the legislative trigger that changes the economics.

The primary directive for the next 12 months is to deliver proof points for lower energy costs, maintaining the social and political support that the energy transition depends on.

“Geothermal is the missing piece of the baseload puzzle” (Philipp Engelkamp, Telura)

As solar and wind dominate the renewable build-out, a quieter but consequential shift is occurring in the background: growing interest in geothermal energy as a source of reliable, continuous baseload power.

Philipp Engelkamp's core thesis is that geothermal occupies a fundamentally different role from intermittent renewables, and that new technology is finally making it commercially viable — and therefore accessible — at scale. The traditional barrier has been exploration risk: drilling deep wells without certainty of finding adequate natural hydrothermal reservoirs. New approaches, including Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and closed-loop systems, remove this constraint by engineering the reservoir rather than depending on what nature provides. Combined with advances in drilling technology, these methods are making projects more predictable, scalable, and bankable.

The regulatory backdrop is also improving. Germany's Geothermal Acceleration Act, taking effect in 2026, is designed to fast-track permitting for deep geothermal projects, removing one of the sector's most persistent obstacles.

Engelkamp's broader argument is that Europe's future energy system will not be built on a single technology. Solar and wind provide cheap, abundant generation; batteries and virtual power plants add temporal flexibility; and geothermal contributes the stable, always-on power that balances the system when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. As AI-driven infrastructure, industrial electrification, and heat pumps push electricity demand higher steadily, that baseload role becomes increasingly valuable.

On supply chains, Engelkamp took the more cautious position among the panelists: even when European components cost more, supply chain diversification is worth the premium. Over-reliance on the cheapest available source, whether for solar panels, batteries, or drilling equipment, creates a catastrophic business risk if geopolitical tensions escalate. The near-monopoly China holds in battery cell manufacturing is a case in point: European manufacturers including Volkswagen and Northvolt have struggled to compete on timing and scale.

“Infrastructure resilience is Europe's blind spot” (Daniel Seidel, LiveEO)

Drawing on firsthand observations from Ukraine, Daniel Seidel made what may have been the roundtable's most sobering contribution: Europe's critical energy infrastructure is physically underprepared for targeted attacks, and the gap between where it is today and where it needs to be is measured in years, not months.

The lesson from Ukraine is stark. High-value infrastructure in active conflict zones is even being moved underground to survive drone and missile strikes. Europe's grid, designed for peacetime operation and optimized for cost over resilience, is not built to this standard, and retrofitting it at scale is both expensive and slow.

Seidel's thesis is that resilience is not just a physical infrastructure problem; it is a systems problem. His key arguments:

• ‍Physical hardening: Critical grid interconnection points, substations, and generation assets need to be undergrounded or otherwise protected against kinetic threats. Europe has not yet made this investment at a meaningful scale.‍
• Digital and cyber resilience: As millions of distributed devices become integrated into the energy system, the attack surface expands dramatically. AI-powered threat detection can identify cyberattacks before they propagate across interconnected systems, but the monitoring capabilities need to match the scale of the network.‍
• Satellite and aerial intelligence: Advanced monitoring technologies, including the kind of satellite-based infrastructure surveillance that LiveEO specializes in, can dramatically improve visibility across critical networks and accelerate incident response times.
• ‍Decentralization as resilience: Decentralized energy architectures are inherently harder to disable with a single strike than centralized plants. But they introduce new vulnerabilities at the inverter and software control layer, which brings the discussion back to sovereignty over the intelligence layer of the grid.‍
• Recovery muscle: Perhaps the most underappreciated point: resilience is not only about preventing disruption but about restoring function quickly. Europe needs more frequent incident training and a better-developed “recovery muscle” to reduce the time from disruption to restoration.

 “Are we hallucinating about energy demand forecasts for AI?” (Prof. Dr. Rolf Wüstenhagen, University of St. Gallen)

Rolf Wüstenhagen contributed a valuable structural perspective to the discussion, grounding the conversation in data and offering a measured view on two topics that generated significant debate: the role of AI in future energy demand, and the future of nuclear power.

On AI energy demand: When an attendee challenged the panel on whether AI data centers represent the dominant driver of future electricity demand, Wüstenhagen offered a carefully calibrated response. While the dominant narrative is one of energy demand for data centers going through the roof, he noted the physical and social limits that constrain exponential growth scenarios. Rising power prices create political pressure; consumers are also voters. His degree of skepticism about unbounded AI energy forecasts is not denial, but a recognition that social and regulatory feedback loops tend to moderate technological demand curves over time.

On nuclear power: In response to an audience question from a nuclear fuel trading professional about whether nuclear fission deserves a more prominent role in Europe's energy sovereignty strategy, Wüstenhagen pointed to the economic evidence. Analyst reports consistently show that at 2-3x the levelized cost of energy compared to renewables, new nuclear power plants remain economically unviable without massive government risk-sharing, and cannot currently compete with the falling costs of solar and wind, which have dropped to EUR 0.05–0.06 per kWh for renewable power generation. At that price level, the high consumer costs Europeans face are driven not by production economics but by market power, taxes, grid tariffs, and regulatory challenges. While basic research on topics like nuclear fusion creates positive spill-over effects for other technologies, the panel broadly agreed that neither fusion nor other nuclear technologies are viable solutions within the next 20-year window that matters for current investment decisions.

On the dependency question: The panel's most nuanced debate concerned whether Europe is simply trading Russian gas dependency for Chinese technology dependency. Wüstenhagen's framing, shared by Schröder, was that the relevant distinction is between importing fuels and importing technology. As the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz painfully demonstrates, a fossil power plant relies on a continuous supply of fuel to generate electricity, whereas a solar panel manufactured in China or a wind turbine imported from Denmark generates local electricity for decades once installed. So while renewable energy clearly helps to reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports, any power system remains vulnerable to cybersecurity risk. If foreign actors retain the ability to manipulate European energy assets through their control over inverter firmware or grid management software, increasing the share of domestic generation is only the first step towards energy independence. 

From Ambition to Execution

Beneath the discussions around grids, geothermal, resilience, and supply chains, one message emerged consistently: Europe already possesses most of the ingredients it needs. The technologies largely exist. Capital is available. Demand continues to grow. What is still required is faster deployment, better infrastructure, and the ability to turn long-term ambition into tangible execution.

As Philipp Engelkamp put it: “Europe has the talent, the technology, and the opportunity.”

The task now is to turn that potential into reality, and to ensure that the speed of execution matches the urgency of the geopolitical and economic moment.

We would like to thank Philipp Schröder, Rolf Wüstenhagen, Philipp Engelkamp, and Daniel Seidel for sharing their perspectives and contributing to a thoughtful and engaging discussion.

‍