I have spent time in Japan and China, engaging with leaders across their diverse energy ecosystems. It is my greatest privilege to join such well‑informed, wise, open, and honest exchanges. Anyone interested in energy can learn a lot from what’s happening at pace across Asia.
In short, Asia’s energy realities are varied yet deeply connected and converging. Both nations are navigating the turbulence of global price volatility, digitalisation, and demographic change, and grappling with new and different collaborations to rebuild local‑to‑global resilience.
Japan: Conservatism vs. speed - and the confidence to evolve
My visit began in Japan for a series of rich exchanges hosted by the Japan Energy Association (JEA), and senior executives across its 100‑member organisations including Institute of Energy Economics, Japan - IEEJ, Japan Gas Association (JGA), The Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, Chubu Electric Power Co., Inc., INPEX Corporation, and TEPCO - Tokyo Electric Power Company, a valued global patron of the World Energy Council.
Our deep‑rooted partnership with TEPCO continues to evolve and remains essential in an era that is becoming increasingly transactional. It stands as a reminder that trust‑based relationships and shared learning — not short‑term transactions — are the true currency of long‑term resilience and transformation.
Japan’s energy story is one of creative tensions: a conservative culture that values reliability and safety in a world that now demands agility and speed. For more than a century, Japan has set the global benchmark for safety culture and engineering excellence. Now, fourteen years after the Fukushima nuclear crisis — a moment that redefined what security, safety, and trust mean to a modern energy society — Japan has entered a new phase of its energy transition.
The recent liberalisation of the retail electricity market was intended to improve efficiency and empower consumers, but has created unintended consequences: a tight supply–demand balance and new vulnerabilities for system resilience. The uneven hand of regulation has left legacy players unable to recover fixed costs or reinvest at scale, while new entrants compete on price in ways that erode collective stability. Energy markets have moved beyond cyclicality and now operate at the edge of volatility.
The regulator’s new capacity market aims to restore confidence and incentivise long‑term investment. Yet the deeper challenge is creating mid‑ to long‑term markets that reward flexibility, not just short‑term survival.
Japan’s prowess in technology resilience for over a century is a bright spot.
The next frontier is a mindset shift: from risk conservatism to dynamic resilience, and a new culture of openness that embraces:
• AI‑enabled real‑time forecasting beyond conventional outlooks
• Demand‑design foresight for an ageing and contracting population
• A user‑centric mindset linking demand flexibility with diversified supply and dynamic storage capacity
These evolutions are not Japan‑only. They are part of a wider rebalancing of energy priorities unfolding across Asia.
China: From volume to integration — translating science fiction into fact
From Tokyo, I travelled to Guangzhou to extend a very warm welcome to China Southern Power Grid Company Limited (CSG) as a new patron of the World Energy Council.
On this side of the East China Sea, the conversation is shifting from technocratic scale to systemic integration. At CSG’s futuristic research centre, I saw its city-centre blended “powerbox” in action — a model of scalable innovation integrating solar, storage, digital twins, and AI-enabled operations to make grids both smarter and more responsive to human needs. Sci-fi has become sci-fact.
China is embedding AI into energy systems, strengthening operations, balancing networks, and enhancing real-time management. Their renewable power build-out continues at unmatched pace and scale, but a new concern is emerging: overcapacity — of generation, manufacturing, and even ambition.
At the International Forum on Energy Transition (IFET) 10th Anniversary Meeting in Suzhou, co-hosted by the National Energy Administration (NEA) and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the mood was clear: energy transitions are unstoppable. But this next phase will require greater attention to trust — the invisible infrastructure of progress — and the development of demand-design foresight to ensure justice and resilience, not just market efficiency.
Leading private-sector pioneers — Golden Concord Holdings Limited, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), and Canadian Solar Inc. — reflected on how China’s renewable revolution is entering a new phase: strengthening grid interconnections, embedding AI into operations, and creating smarter balancing systems at scale.
China’s ability to combine disciplined imagination with will and skill, and its commitment to the Humanising Energy vision of ecological civilisation, offer realistic hope that others may do the same. Its focus is shifting to:
• Upgrading regional power pools and cross-border exchanges;
• Managing supply chain cooling after years of accelerated capacity expansion; and
• Embedding AI-driven foresight to enable smart balancing and real-time decision-making.
China’s incredible journey from energy scarcity in the 1980s to global leadership in 2025 shows that abundance without alignment risks inefficiency — but collaboration and coordination can turn overcapacity into opportunity.
Common threads across Asia
There are clear themes emerging across borders. Overcapacity is a shared concern, but responses differ by context and culture. Resilience now depends as much on social licence, digital governance, and foresight capacity as on technology or fuel mix.
The next phase will hinge on connecting grids, data, and demand‑design foresight — creating regional ecosystems that can anticipate, not just react to, volatility.
Investing in resilience: The financial bridge to FII9
As I now travel on to the Middle East for FII Institute's FII9 and ADIPEC Exhibition and Conference, one message rings clear: we need a new financial realism to match the physics and materiality of energy transitions — plural.
Current ESG constraints are locking up more capital than they are unlocking. Too much focus is placed on stress‑testing individual assets, and not enough on agility and adaptability, including human capabilities and behaviours. The task ahead is to bring demand‑design foresight into the centre of finance; to value resilience as a return on investment, not just as a risk to be priced.
Investing in resilience is essential preparation for both old and new security challenges. In an era of compound shocks, resilience is the new ROI, and the most forward‑looking investors are learning to value longer time horizons, greater trust between sectors, and system‑level transformation.
And resilience itself is evolving. From engineered systems and physical stocks — grids, reserves, redundancies — to a new model of dynamic resilience: a living property of energy systems that includes people and communities, not just infrastructure.
We also need a new innovation mindset. Techno‑optimism hides fragility — from clean‑energy supply chains that risk becoming tomorrow’s waste to over‑centralised systems that fail under pressure. The future will be built through place‑based innovation and bottom‑up scaling mechanisms better suited to increasingly decentralised and hybrid energy systems. This is both essential and urgent to address the trade‑offs between deeper decarbonisation and circularity, where shifting demand and wiser choices are imaginable, and people — not technologies — drive transformation.
A line from an ancient poet — and a modern challenge
An ancient Chinese poet once wrote: “By setting sail together, we can ride the wind, break the waves, and brave the journey of ten thousand miles.”
The modern challenge is this: we’ll only get there if we resist drowning in an ocean of reports; keep one eye on the ever‑changing horizon; open our minds to new possibilities; learn how to navigate together rather than trying to out‑swim each other; and rebuild the ship — transitioning the crew — while new winds buffet us in uncharted waters.
This article is also published on LinkedIn. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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