All Energy 2026: What I'm Going to Glasgow to Understand

All Energy has been on my calendar for more years than I care to count. It is one of those events you start attending for the sessions and keep attending for the patterns.

When you go to the same conference year after year, you stop consuming it and start reading it. The themes that fill the main stage change. The conversations in the corridors shift. What was a packed breakout five years ago is a quiet fringe session today. New urgencies appear. Old certainties quietly disappear.

This Wednesday I am heading to Glasgow with one question in mind: given everything that has changed in the last twelve months, where is this industry actually positioning itself now?

How the Event Has Changed Year by Year

When I first attended All Energy, oil and gas still held the centre of gravity. The sector was the dominant commercial force, the main employer, and the assumed future. That started to shift.

Wind came next. Then hydrogen had its moment, with significant attention on Scotland's potential as a green hydrogen producer. Then came something more complicated: the honest reckoning with what energy transition actually requires.

Not a clean switch. Not a single technology replacing another overnight. A layered, blended, funding-dependent process requiring infrastructure investment at scale, political will sustained over multiple parliamentary terms, and an industry willing to plan through uncertainty rather than wait for clarity.

Last year, the clearest thing I took from the event was that the government framework was not settled. There was ambition at the top and a lot of waiting at the ground level. Funding decisions deferred. Direction signals mixed. Businesses aligned to the sector were holding their nerve.

Why This Year Feels Different

A lot has happened since then.

The Middle East. Oil price volatility that has made forecasting harder and energy security conversations sharper. A geopolitical backdrop that has brought questions about dependency and resilience back to the top of the agenda across governments and boardrooms alike.

Last week's election results across the UK add another dimension to that uncertainty. More questions about direction at the top. More businesses waiting before they commit. It reinforces rather than changes the question I am taking into the room, but it sharpens it.

I am curious whether the settled-ness that was missing last year has arrived. Whether the conversations at government level have produced a clearer direction. Whether the industry has recalibrated around the new signals or is still in the same holding pattern.

I am not going in with a view. I am going in to take the temperature.

The agenda itself is a signal. The Minister for Energy is keynoting on clean power as a driver of national security and industrial renewal. His stated framing is that the energy transition has shifted from an ideas challenge to a delivery challenge. If that position has filtered through from government to industry, the conversations in the room will feel different to last year. Whether it has is exactly what I want to find out.

The Question I'm Taking Into the Room

Has the government position got clearer? And if so, what does that mean for the businesses, large and small, that have been planning around the original energy transition trajectory?

These are not abstract questions. For businesses that supply into the energy sector, or that have built services around it, the policy direction shapes investment decisions, hiring decisions, and long-term positioning. A framework that shifts creates real disruption at the operational level.

I want to understand how the sector is thinking about strategy in this environment. Whether it is adapting, waiting, or finding a third path.

What This Means for Founder-Led SMEs

The energy sector's challenge is not unique to energy. It is the challenge of building a credible strategy when the framework above you keeps moving.

Founder-led SMEs face this constantly. Policy changes. Market conditions shift. A government incentive disappears. A key customer changes direction. The businesses that handle this well are not the ones that predicted it correctly. They are the ones that built positions, not plans: strategic foundations that do not depend on a single variable staying fixed.

Watching the energy sector navigate this over the years has sharpened how I think about strategy for the businesses I work with. You cannot build a strategy that assumes certainty at the top. You build one that is resilient when it is absent.

How PeakRatio Helps

PeakRatio works with founder-led SMEs to identify the foundations of their business that hold when the landscape shifts: the commercial levers, operational disciplines, and strategic positioning that remain relevant regardless of what changes around them.

That includes businesses operating in or adjacent to sectors facing significant transition, whether that is energy, construction, property, or services. The methodology is the same: understand the highest-leverage parts of the business, build on what is durable, and stop over-investing in what depends on external certainty.

If your business is navigating an uncertain environment and you want to understand where your strategic foundations are strongest, and where they are not, talk to PeakRatio.