Field Notes
Davos 2026, Debriefed: The Year Energy Economics Took the Chair
Every Davos has an official theme and a real one. The official conversations of the 56th Annual Meeting ranged across AI, security, and trade. The real theme, audible in every private room we hosted and attended, was simpler: energy economics has replaced labor economics as the measure of national competitiveness. As we argued in CEOWORLD ahead of the meeting: the question is no longer dollars per hour, but dollars per kilowatt-hour.
Three shifts stood out. First, the transition debate has left morality behind and arrived at arithmetic: nobody in a serious room argued about green premiums; they argued about execution velocity: who can permit, build, and energize fastest. Second, capital has become jurisdictionally choosy: allocators openly ranked countries by grid queue, permitting reality, and political durability, the way they once ranked them by wage costs. Third, the nature-and-resilience agenda moved from side event to balance sheet, priced as infrastructure rather than philanthropy.
What the Forum taught us
At Palace Schatzalp we convened fifteen world-leading technology companies, spanning electric propulsion, AI for the built environment, energy, biotech, and real assets, together with family offices, institutional investors, and policymakers, for a fully curated week: private apartments, a structured program, and the closed-door sessions where positions actually change. The week culminated in the Global CleanTech Investor Gala & Awards Ceremony and the Global Climate Leaders Awards, with leadership from Vestas Wind Systems, 4AIR & Alder Renewables, Lightbridge, Zeem Solutions, Green2X, and the U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce on stage.
The lesson we took as investors: curation beats attendance. A delegate with a badge is a spectator; a delegate with a schedule, a stage, and the right dinner seat is a participant in the year's capital formation. Several of our 2026 delegation companies left Davos with term-sheet conversations, government introductions, and distribution partnerships that would have taken a year of cold outreach.
Gala Programme & Agenda, Davos 2026 The run of show for the evening at Palace Schatzalp: named speakers, the three session blocks, and the awards ceremony. PDF · 2 pages · 1.2 MB Open the programme →
Toward 2027
The second Global CleanTech Forum is planned for Davos in January 2027, again built as a full-week curated delegation. Applications are open now to a limited number of scaling technology companies, and to family offices and institutional investors who want a structured seat in those rooms. Read about the 2027 delegation and apply →
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