35 Leading Thought Leaders in Electricity Globally

Electricity is the most underrated subject in modern life. The lights come on, the data centre hums, the heat pump runs, the train glides into the station, and almost no one thinks about why. Yet every major economic and political question of the next decade, from artificial intelligence to manufacturing reshoring to climate policy to the cost of living, runs through one shared bottleneck. The grid. According to the International Energy Agency, global electricity demand is forecast to grow at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent through 2030, fifty percent faster than the past decade and double the rate of overall energy demand. The Ember Global Electricity Review reported that in 2025, clean sources met all the growth in global electricity demand for the first time, with solar alone providing roughly three quarters of the rise. The age of electricity has arrived faster than the policy world has caught up to it.

This guide profiles 35 of the most credible, active, and genuinely valuable thought leaders working on electricity globally in 2026. These are the analysts, engineers, journalists, financiers, regulators, and academics whose work is genuinely shaping how the world thinks about power systems. Some are well known names in the field. Some are voices most readers will not have encountered before, deliberately included because the conversation about electricity has too often been dominated by a handful of household names. The list spans the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Canada, and beyond. It includes researchers at Princeton and Oxford, former regulators, financial analysts who track the global electricity transition for a living, and consultants who have spent decades inside utilities and grid operators.

If you lead a team that has anything to do with electricity, whether you sit inside a utility, a regulator, a major industrial customer, an investor, a policy shop, or a school board trying to understand why your power bills are rising, these are the voices worth following. To discuss leadership development, keynote presentations, or facilitation for your team navigating the energy transition, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Electricity Matters Now

For most of the past forty years, the electricity sector has been treated as a backwater. Demand grew slowly. Costs were predictable. The technology mix changed only at the margins. Strategic conversations focused elsewhere. That era is over. Electricity demand growth in the United States has accelerated from near zero to its fastest rate in two decades, driven by a combination of data centre construction, manufacturing reshoring, transportation electrification, and the gradual move away from gas in heating. The Deloitte 2026 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook estimated that the US electric power sector faces capital needs of more than 1.4 trillion US dollars through 2030. Globally, clean energy investment reached an estimated 2.2 trillion US dollars in 2025.

The leaders who matter in this space are not just commentators. They are people who can read a power purchase agreement, understand how a regional transmission organisation operates, model the implications of a tariff change, and explain to a non-specialist audience why the grid is suddenly the linchpin of the broader economy. They engage with technical complexity without hiding behind it. They are willing to disagree with consensus when the evidence warrants disagreement. They publish, they teach, they advise, and they show up in the public conversation. Following them is not a substitute for engaging with the technical literature, but it is one of the fastest ways to develop a working understanding of how the global electricity system is changing.

How This List Was Compiled

This list was assembled through a deliberate process designed to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered, alongside the obvious candidates. The selection criteria emphasised formal credentials in the electricity sector, the quality and originality of each person's contribution, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and genuine impact on how the field has evolved. The list spans researchers, regulators, analysts, financiers, journalists, engineers, and academics. It deliberately includes voices from emerging markets and from professional contexts that often go underrepresented in lists of this kind. Where the obvious choice was to recycle the same dozen household names that appear on every leadership list adjacent to this topic, this list moved past those names in favour of fresher voices doing genuinely original work. Forty six percent of those featured are women. Roughly forty percent work outside the United States.

The Voices Shaping Power Systems

Every electricity transition runs through a small group of analysts, modellers, and policy designers whose work shapes how governments and utilities make decisions. The five people in this category have done more than commentate. They have built the analytical infrastructure that policymakers, journalists, and investors now rely on to understand what is actually happening in the global electricity system.

1. Sonia Aggarwal

Sonia Aggarwal sits at the intersection of climate policy design and grid economics in a way few others can match. As CEO of Energy Innovation Policy and Technology, the San Francisco based think tank she co-founded more than a decade ago, she leads one of the most rigorous independent voices on US power sector policy.

Aggarwal previously served as Special Assistant to President Biden for Climate Policy, Innovation, and Deployment, where she helped to set the United States commitment to cut greenhouse gases by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. She also developed and led America's Power Plan, the platform that brought together more than 150 energy experts to outline policy priorities for deep decarbonisation of the electricity sector, and the Energy Policy Simulator, an open source modelling tool now used by policymakers worldwide.

2. Jesse Jenkins

If there is a single person whose modelling work has shaped the way the United States government thinks about the electricity transition, it is Jesse Jenkins. An associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, he leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, the Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory.

Jenkins is co-host of the Shift Key podcast with Robinson Meyer, where he translates complex grid economics into accessible weekly conversations. His Net-Zero America study, co-authored with Eric Larson, Chris Greig, and a team at Princeton, became a foundational document for US climate policy and was widely cited during the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. The REPEAT Project, a joint effort with Evolved Energy Research, continues to provide policymakers and journalists with timely independent analysis of federal policy impacts.

3. Saul Griffith

Saul Griffith is the Australian born inventor and engineer whose 2022 book Electrify, published by MIT Press, distilled the case for mass electrification into a single accessible argument that has reshaped the policy conversation in the United States, Australia, and beyond. He is the founder of Rewiring America, a non-profit dedicated to electrifying everything in the US economy.

Griffith was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 2007 and is also founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. His more recent advocacy through Rewiring Australia has applied the same framework to his home country, with a particular focus on the household level economics of replacing fossil fuel appliances and vehicles with electric alternatives powered by an increasingly clean grid. His central insight, that an all electric economy needs less primary energy than a fossil fuel economy because electric machines are simply more efficient, has become the conceptual backbone of the modern electrification movement.

4. David Roberts

David Roberts has been reporting on and explaining clean energy for nearly two decades, first at Grist, then at Vox, and now through his independent Substack and podcast Volts. He is also editor at large at Canary Media. Few journalists working today combine deep technical fluency with genuine accessibility the way Roberts does.

His Volts podcast has become required listening for anyone serious about the global power sector, with deep dive episodes on virtual power plants, regional transmission organisations, utility regulation, capacity markets, and the technical bottlenecks slowing the energy transition. His recurring series on data centres and the grid, his interviews with figures across the political spectrum, and his willingness to interrogate his own previous positions have made him one of the most influential voices in the conversation about how the electricity system needs to change.

5. Jigar Shah

Jigar Shah is a serial entrepreneur and one of the most consequential figures in modern clean energy finance. He founded SunEdison in 2003, where he pioneered the no money down solar power purchase agreement model that helped unlock a multi-billion dollar industry. He later co-founded Generate Capital, a sustainable infrastructure investment platform, and served as the founding CEO of the Carbon War Room.

From 2021 to early 2025, Shah directed the US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, where he oversaw the deployment of more than 100 billion US dollars in loans and conditional commitments to clean energy projects. He is the author of Creating Climate Wealth, published in 2013, and now co-hosts two podcasts, Energy Empire and Open Circuit, which sit among the most listened to shows in the sector. He also serves as founding advisory chair of Deploy Action, a non-profit focused on smart energy reforms.

The Analysts and Modellers Tracking the Transition

These voices spend their days building the data sets, models, and reports that the rest of the field references. They sit at think tanks and research firms whose output sets the terms of the global conversation about what is actually happening in electricity markets.

6. Kingsmill Bond

Kingsmill Bond is the energy strategist whose work has done more than perhaps any other to translate the financial logic of the global electricity transition into language that financial markets understand. After thirty years as a financial market analyst at Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and others, he has spent the last decade focused exclusively on the energy transition, working at Carbon Tracker, then RMI, and since 2025 at Ember.

His Electrotech Revolution report, released in September 2025, argued that the world is on the cusp of a fundamentally new energy age built on renewables, batteries, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. His earlier RMI work with Sam Butler-Sloss on the Energy Transition Narrative made the influential case that solar and wind growth follows technology S-curves rather than linear adoption patterns. He has presented to investors, policymakers, and academics across the world.

7. Tim Buckley

Tim Buckley is one of Australia's most influential independent voices on the global electricity transition, with a particular focus on India and greater Asia. As Director of Climate Energy Finance, the Sydney based think tank he founded after leaving the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, he combines thirty years of equity research experience with a sharp focus on stranded asset risk in the fossil fuel sector.

Buckley spent seventeen years at Citigroup as Managing Director and Head of Equity Research, and previously served as IEEFA's Director of Energy Finance Studies for Australasia and South Asia from 2013 to 2021. His work tracks the financial flows reshaping Australian and Indian power systems and the political economy of coal phase out. His regular commentary in RenewEconomy and other Australian publications has made him a key voice in the country's energy transition debate.

8. Vibhuti Garg

Vibhuti Garg is the most authoritative independent voice on India's electricity transition, with more than 21 years of experience in the energy sector. As Director for South Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, she leads the organisation's work on energy pricing, subsidy reforms, market design, and the financial viability of state owned distribution companies.

Garg's work has been particularly influential in shaping the Indian conversation about transmission bottlenecks, distribution sector reform, and the need for short term electricity markets and derivatives. Her 2020 IEEFA report Increasing competition in India's intra-state transmission sector helped frame the policy debate about how to scale renewable integration in a country where the grid has become the binding constraint. Based in New Delhi, she holds an MA in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics.

9. Robinson Meyer

Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, the climate and energy media company he launched in 2023, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. He is also co-host of the Shift Key podcast with Jesse Jenkins.

Meyer was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate change, science, and technology and helped launch the magazine's climate section. In April 2026, he and Heatmap launched the Electricity Price Hub in partnership with the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, a public data platform providing monthly utility level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States. His New York Times opinion writing on data centres, electricity prices, and the broken grid has helped frame the political conversation about power infrastructure as a mainstream economic issue.

10. Meredith Angwin

Meredith Angwin is the chemist and grid policy commentator whose 2020 book Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid has become essential reading for anyone trying to understand the policy machinery behind the lights staying on. Once a project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, where she was one of the first women in that role, she now writes and teaches about grid governance from her base in Vermont.

Angwin served for four years on the Coordinating Committee for the Consumer Liaison Group associated with ISO New England, the regional grid operator covering most of the northeastern United States. Her work focuses on the institutional logic of regional transmission organisations and the gap between what grid operators promise and what they can actually deliver during periods of stress. Her perspective is often at odds with the renewable energy consensus, which is precisely why her voice belongs on a serious list.

11. Gretchen Bakke

Gretchen Bakke is the cultural anthropologist who, with her 2016 book The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, brought the social and cultural dimensions of electricity into the mainstream conversation. The book was named one of Bill Gates's top five books of 2016 and remains one of the few accessible histories of how the United States ended up with the electrical infrastructure it has.

Bakke holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and currently holds a Heisenberg Position split between the Institute for European Ethnology and the Institute for Human-Environment Transitions at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her current work explores the cultural dimensions of large scale energy transitions, with field research in the North Sea oil communities of Scotland and ongoing writing about supergrids and the social fabric of electricity systems.

12. Kostantsa Rangelova

Kostantsa Rangelova is a global electricity analyst at Ember, the London based energy think tank whose annual Global Electricity Review has become the definitive open data source for tracking the global power sector. She joined Ember after working as a senior energy and climate analyst at the Centre for the Study of Democracy in Bulgaria and as a researcher at JBC Energy in Vienna.

Rangelova was lead author of Ember's December 2025 report How Cheap is Battery Storage, which documented the dramatic fall in utility scale battery costs to roughly 65 US dollars per megawatt hour outside China and the United States. She co-authored the 2026 Global Electricity Review and is a regular contributor to public commentary on the global power sector, with her work cited in coverage from Bloomberg, the BBC, the Financial Times, and major outlets across Europe and Asia.

The Academics Building the Knowledge Base

Universities have produced some of the sharpest electricity thinking of the past decade. The voices in this category combine rigorous research with public engagement, translating complex technical questions into work that influences regulators, utilities, and policymakers.

13. Leah Stokes

Leah Stokes is one of the most influential US academics working on the political economy of the electricity transition. An associate professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara, she is the author of Short Circuiting Policy, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, which examined how electric utilities have used political power to slow the transition to clean energy.

Stokes has testified before the US Congress on the economic benefits of household electrification and was a senior policy advisor to the Biden Harris administration during the development of the Inflation Reduction Act. Her work on utility political economy, state level renewable portfolio standards, and the policy design of the IRA has made her one of the most cited voices on how political and institutional dynamics shape what is technically and economically possible in electricity policy.

14. Lauri Myllyvirta

Lauri Myllyvirta is the Finnish analyst who has become the most authoritative independent voice on Chinese electricity and emissions outside China itself. He is the lead analyst and co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Helsinki based research organisation focused on the health and climate impacts of fossil fuel combustion.

Myllyvirta's monthly briefings on Chinese coal, solar, and electricity demand are read closely by policymakers, journalists, and investors trying to understand the country whose electricity decisions effectively determine global emissions trajectories. His work on the 15th Five Year Plan, co-authored with Belinda Schäpe, has been particularly influential in shaping the Western conversation about whether and when Chinese emissions will peak. He is a regular guest on Shift Key and other major energy podcasts.

15. Costa Samaras

Costa Samaras is the Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. His research focuses on the engineering and policy challenges of decarbonising electricity, transportation, and industrial systems in the United States.

Samaras served at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2021 to 2024, including as Principal Assistant Director for Energy and as OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition, where he helped shape federal energy research and innovation strategy during the Biden administration. His current Carnegie Mellon research includes work on the electricity demands of data centres, grid resilience to extreme weather, and the integration of distributed energy resources into US power systems. He was Lead Author of the Mitigation Chapter of the 6th US National Climate Assessment.

16. Tyler Norris

Tyler Norris is the Duke University researcher whose work on flexible interconnection and large flexible loads has helped reshape the conversation about how the United States grid can accommodate massive new electricity demand without years of expensive new generation and transmission. He is a researcher at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

Norris's 2025 work on data centre flexibility and the implications of treating large industrial loads as flexible rather than firm has been widely cited in the New York Times, Heatmap, and trade publications. His recent New York Times opinion piece co-authored with Robinson Meyer and Jigar Shah on how to fix the broken US grid drew significant policymaker attention. Before Duke, Norris served as the Vice President of Development at Cypress Creek Renewables and held energy policy roles in North Carolina state government.

17. Hala Ballouz

Hala Ballouz is the Lebanese American president and chief executive officer of Electric Power Engineers, the Austin Texas based engineering consultancy that advises utilities, independent power producers, and grid operators on transmission planning, grid modernisation, and renewable integration. Founded in 1972, the firm now employs hundreds of engineers and software developers across multiple offices.

Ballouz has been a visible advocate for women in the electricity engineering profession and a regular keynote speaker at industry events including the Energy Thought Summit. Under her leadership, EPE has expanded into proprietary grid analytics software through its sister company ENER-I.AI and has become one of the most prominent women led firms in the US electricity sector. Her advocacy on grid modernisation in Texas and beyond combines deep technical credibility with a commercial track record few others on this list can match.

18. Melissa Lott

Melissa Lott is Director of Research at Columbia University's SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy, one of the most influential energy policy research centres in the United States, and Professor of Practice at Columbia's Climate School. She holds a PhD in energy and resources from University College London and master's degrees from the University of Texas at Austin.

Lott hosts the Big Switch podcast, which translates complex energy systems questions into accessible long form conversations. Her current research focuses on the electrification of heating and transport, the integration of clean firm power technologies, and the role of distributed energy resources in future grids. She is a frequent voice in the New York Times, The Economist, and major broadcast media on questions of how to electrify the US economy at the speed and scale the climate problem demands. She received the AGU Pavel S. Molchanov Climate Communications Prize in 2023.

The Financiers and Strategists

Capital is the bottleneck in every electricity transition. The people in this category translate between the worlds of finance and engineering, helping investors, banks, and pension funds understand what they are actually buying when they buy into the global electricity transition.

19. Michael Liebreich

Michael Liebreich is the British analyst, entrepreneur, and commentator whose New Energy Finance, founded in 2004 and acquired by Bloomberg in 2009 to become BloombergNEF, transformed the way financial markets track the global energy transition. He now runs Liebreich Associates and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.

Liebreich is a regular columnist on energy economics, with a particular focus on the limits of hydrogen, the economics of nuclear power, and the realistic timelines for deep decarbonisation. His Cleaning Up podcast, now in its eighth season, has featured conversations with energy ministers, utility CEOs, climate scientists, and entrepreneurs from across the global electricity sector. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and was a member of the British Olympic skiing team.

20. Mark Z. Jacobson

Mark Z. Jacobson is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and Director of the Atmosphere and Energy Program. He is the author of the most influential and most contested academic work on 100 percent renewable energy systems globally, including detailed pathway analyses for individual countries and US states.

Jacobson's books include 100 percent Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press, and No Miracles Needed, published in 2023, which argues that the technologies required for the energy transition already exist and that the remaining barriers are political and economic rather than technical. His public engagement on questions of electricity reliability, the role of nuclear power, and the achievability of 100 percent renewable systems has made him both one of the most cited and most contested voices in the field.

21. Audrey Zibelman

Audrey Zibelman has had one of the most distinguished careers of anyone working on electricity globally. A Senior Advisor at Alvarez and Marsal Energy and head of her own firm Zibelman Energy Advisors, she previously served as the chief executive officer of the Australian Energy Market Operator from 2017 to 2020, where she led one of the most ambitious grid transformation efforts in the world.

Before AEMO, Zibelman served as Chair of the New York Public Service Commission, where she led the Reforming the Energy Vision initiative, one of the most ambitious utility regulation reform efforts in US history. She was also previously Executive Vice President at PJM Interconnection, the largest US wholesale electricity market, and was Vice President and Advisor at X, Alphabet's moonshot factory, where she led an effort on grid digitalisation. She continues to advise utilities, governments, and investors on grid modernisation and the integration of distributed energy resources globally.

22. Cheryl LaFleur

Cheryl LaFleur served as a Commissioner of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2010 to 2019, including as Chairman from 2014 to 2015 and as Acting Chairman during 2013 to 2014 and again in 2017. She is now Chair of the ISO New England Board of Directors, having joined the board in 2019 and served as chair since 2021. She is also an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Advisory Board Member at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.

LaFleur's work as a former regulator gives her one of the most authoritative public voices on the institutional design of US wholesale electricity markets, capacity markets, and the regulatory pathways for integrating new technologies into the grid. Before joining FERC she was Executive Vice President and Acting CEO of National Grid USA. She is a frequent speaker and commentator on FERC's role in shaping the energy transition, particularly on questions of transmission planning, gas electric coordination, and the design of capacity markets in regions like New England and PJM.

The Practitioners and Operators

Some of the sharpest thinking about electricity comes from people who have spent their careers actually running parts of the system rather than studying it from the outside. The practitioners in this category bring operational credibility that academics and analysts cannot match.

23. Doug Lewin

Doug Lewin is the principal of Stoic Energy, the Texas based independent energy consultancy, and the author of the Texas Energy and Power newsletter, which has become one of the most influential independent commentaries on the Texas electricity market. The Texas market is uniquely important globally because the state has both the highest renewable build out and the most fragile grid governance of any major economy.

Lewin's coverage of ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, his analysis of the February 2021 winter storm and its aftermath, and his ongoing commentary on Texas policy, virtual power plants, and demand flexibility have made him a key reference point for journalists, policymakers, and investors trying to understand what is actually happening in the Texas power system. He is a regular guest on the Volts podcast and other major energy shows.

24. Maria van der Hoeven

Maria van der Hoeven served as Executive Director of the International Energy Agency from 2011 to 2015, the period during which the IEA began to take seriously the implications of falling renewable costs and the eventual peak in fossil fuel demand. She had previously served as the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs from 2007 to 2010.

Van der Hoeven now serves on multiple boards and as a senior fellow at the Clingendael International Energy Programme in The Hague. Her current work focuses on the geopolitics of the energy transition, the role of natural gas in European energy security, and the policy dynamics of the European electricity market. As one of the few former IEA chiefs to remain publicly engaged in the global energy conversation, her voice carries particular weight in European policy circles.

25. Dharik Mallapragada

Dharik Mallapragada is an associate professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and a research affiliate at the MIT Energy Initiative. His research focuses on the design and operation of low carbon electricity systems, with particular emphasis on the role of long duration energy storage, hydrogen, and other clean firm power technologies.

Mallapragada was previously a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, where he led the technical analysis behind the influential Future of Storage study published in 2022. His current work at NYU Tandon focuses on the integration of hydrogen, geothermal, and other clean firm power options into electricity systems heavily reliant on variable renewables. He represents a younger generation of academic energy systems engineers whose work directly informs how regulators and utilities make planning decisions.

26. Joe Daniel

Joe Daniel is a manager in the Carbon-Free Electricity programme at the Rocky Mountain Institute, where he focuses on the regulatory and economic mechanics of how electric utilities make profits and how those incentive structures can be reformed to align with public interest in clean, reliable, affordable electricity.

Daniel's work focuses on what he calls the force field of tedium that protects utility regulation from public scrutiny. His February 2026 appearance on the Volts podcast, in which he unpacked the distinction between return on equity and cost of equity, became one of the most discussed episodes in the show's history. He is a regular contributor to Utility Dive, RMI's own publications, and policy briefings to state regulators across the United States.

27. Tessa Weiss

Tessa Weiss is a senior associate at the Rocky Mountain Institute, where her work focuses on industrial decarbonisation, the integration of large electric loads into grids, and the economic case for industrial electrification. She has emerged as one of the sharpest younger voices on the question of how to electrify heavy industry without simply moving emissions from one sector to another.

Weiss's recent RMI work on industrial heat electrification, the integration of data centres into US power systems, and the economics of clean firm power has been widely cited in industry trade press. She represents the next generation of analysts working at the intersection of industrial policy, electricity economics, and climate strategy, and her commentary on LinkedIn and at conferences has built a substantial following among practitioners.

28. Daniel Cohan

Daniel Cohan is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University and the author of the 2022 book Confronting Climate Gridlock, which provides one of the most accessible technical explanations of how the United States can decarbonise its electricity system within current political constraints.

Cohan's work focuses on the air quality, climate, and grid implications of different electricity policy choices, with particular attention to the Texas grid given Rice's location in Houston. He is a regular commentator in the Houston Chronicle and other regional publications on questions of grid reliability, the economics of solar plus storage, and the air quality benefits of moving away from gas peaker plants. His combination of technical rigour and clear public communication has made him an important voice in the southern US electricity conversation.

The Journalists and Communicators

The general public encounters most ideas about electricity through journalism. The voices in this category have built careers translating the technical and political complexity of the power sector into stories that policymakers, investors, and citizens can actually engage with.

29. Anjli Raval

Anjli Raval is the management editor at the Financial Times, having previously served as the FT's senior energy correspondent for nearly a decade. Her reporting has covered the major inflection points in the global electricity and energy transition, from the rise of corporate power purchase agreements to the geopolitics of LNG and the European response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Raval's work has been widely recognised, including the Foreign Press Association Business Story of the Year and multiple Reuters Institute fellowships. Her current writing for the FT continues to engage with the electricity transition through the lens of corporate strategy, capital allocation, and the geopolitics of critical minerals. As one of the most widely read business journalists working on energy, her framing has shaped how senior executives and investors think about the electricity transition.

30. Kelly Trout

Kelly Trout is the research co-director at Oil Change International, the Washington DC based research and advocacy organisation. Her work focuses on tracking fossil fuel finance, oil and gas expansion, and the policy levers needed to align the global energy system with the Paris Agreement temperature goals.

Trout co-authors the annual Big Oil Reality Check report and has been a lead author of multiple reports on the alignment of the international financial architecture with climate goals, including major work on export credit agencies, multilateral development bank lending, and public finance for fossil fuels. Her work bridges the worlds of energy finance, climate policy, and development economics, and has been particularly influential in shaping the conversation about how to redirect global capital flows away from new fossil fuel infrastructure and toward electricity grids in emerging markets.

31. Joel Jaeger

Joel Jaeger is a senior research associate at the World Resources Institute, where he focuses on the economic, employment, and equity dimensions of the energy transition. His work has been particularly influential in shaping the conversation about clean energy jobs, the geographic distribution of transition impacts, and the policy design needed to ensure a just transition.

Jaeger leads WRI's work on clean energy employment data and the just transition, with regular publications on the implications of major US, European, and Asian climate and industrial policies for workers and communities. His commentary has appeared in major outlets including the New York Times and the Financial Times, and his careful, data driven approach has made him a reliable reference point for policymakers and journalists trying to understand the political economy of the electricity transition.

The European and Asian Specialists

The conversation about electricity is too often framed through a US lens. The voices in this final category bring perspectives from Europe and Asia that are essential for anyone trying to understand the global power system, since the bulk of new electricity demand and the bulk of new clean generation is being built outside the United States.

32. Daan Walter

Daan Walter is a Dutch energy systems analyst who joined Ember in 2025 from RMI, where he was a principal in the climate intelligence programme. He was a co-author with Kingsmill Bond and Sam Butler-Sloss of the influential Cleantech Revolution analysis, which used technology S-curve modelling to project the trajectory of global solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle deployment.

Walter's modelling work has been particularly important in framing the international conversation about peak fossil fuel demand and the disruptive economics of cleantech adoption in emerging markets. His move from RMI to Ember positions him to continue translating the financial and economic logic of the global electricity transition for European audiences, where the conversation has become increasingly anxious about competitiveness with both China and the United States. His LinkedIn commentary has built a substantial following among European policymakers and investors.

33. Anna Krajinska

Anna Krajinska is a senior director at Transport and Environment, the Brussels based federation of European environmental NGOs, where she leads work on the electrification of road transport and its implications for European electricity systems. Originally from Poland, she has become one of the most influential advocates for the electrification of European transport.

Krajinska's reports on the lifecycle emissions of electric vehicles, the grid implications of mass road transport electrification, and the policy design of European charging infrastructure have shaped the European Union conversation about how to decarbonise the largest single source of European oil demand. Her work bridges the worlds of automotive policy, electricity grid operations, and consumer protection, and has been particularly influential in shaping the European Union 2035 internal combustion engine phase out.

34. Brett Christophers

Brett Christophers is a Professor of Human Geography at Uppsala University in Sweden and the author of The Price is Wrong, published in 2024 by Verso Books, which has become one of the most discussed books in global electricity economics in recent years. The book argues that the levelised cost of electricity framework systematically overstates the financial viability of renewable power generation.

Christophers's work bridges human geography, political economy, and electricity finance in a way that few other academics manage. His earlier book Our Lives in Their Portfolios, published in 2023, examined the rise of asset manager capitalism in infrastructure including electricity. His commentary in the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, and other outlets has provoked sustained debate among electricity economists about the political economy assumptions underlying the modern global power transition.

35. Hannah Ritchie

Hannah Ritchie is the Scottish data scientist whose work at Our World in Data, the Oxford based public information project, has done more than perhaps any other single source to make global electricity data accessible to general readers, journalists, and policymakers. She is Deputy Editor at Our World in Data and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin School.

Ritchie is the author of two books, Not the End of the World, published in 2024, and Clearing the Air, published in 2025, both with Chatto and Windus. Her Substack newsletter Sustainability by Numbers has more than 60,000 subscribers and her TED Talk on whether the current generation can be the first sustainable one has been viewed millions of times. She was elected to Scotland's Just Transition Commission in 2024. Her data driven, fact based approach to electricity, energy, and climate has made her one of the most trusted public communicators in the field.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several names that would appear on most lists like this were considered seriously and ultimately not included in the numbered 35. Brené Brown, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, Patrick Lencioni, Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, and Susan Cain are all foundational voices in adjacent fields like leadership and organisational behaviour, but none focus on electricity specifically and their inclusion would have crowded out genuine electricity specialists. Their absence from this list reflects an editorial choice to surface fresher voices in the specific domain of power systems, not a judgement on their broader work.

Beyond these, several senior figures in the global electricity conversation were considered carefully. Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, has shaped the global conversation as much as any single person, but his role is primarily institutional rather than as an independent thought leader. Amory Lovins, the founder of RMI, did seminal work on soft path electricity decades ago, though his recent output has slowed. Paul Joskow at MIT remains one of the foundational economists of US electricity markets, though his public engagement is now limited. Cheryl LaFleur was included in the main list but her FERC contemporary Neil Chatterjee and others were considered. The point of any list is that exclusions are inevitable. The 35 above represent a deliberate attempt to balance technical rigour, geographic spread, and disciplinary diversity in a field that is changing too quickly for any single list to capture comprehensively.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Electricity Thought Leadership

The first mistake people make is treating the electricity sector as if it were the same as the broader climate or energy conversation. Electricity is a specific technical and economic system with its own institutional logic, regulatory machinery, and operational constraints. Voices who are excellent on climate policy or fossil fuel divestment may have little useful to say about how a regional transmission organisation actually works, and the reverse is equally true. Read with discrimination. Notice when a commentator is operating inside their actual area of expertise versus when they are reaching beyond it.

The second mistake is following only voices whose conclusions you already agree with. The electricity sector contains genuine technical and economic disagreements that no amount of advocacy can resolve. Including voices like Meredith Angwin alongside voices like Saul Griffith on the same reading list is not an act of false balance. It is an acknowledgement that the design of future electricity systems involves real trade offs between reliability, cost, emissions, and political feasibility, and that any serious engagement with the field requires reading across the perspectives. The temptation to filter out voices that complicate one's preferred narrative is the single most common failure mode for people new to the electricity conversation.

The third mistake is overweighting US voices in what is actually a global story. Most new electricity demand and most new clean generation in the next decade will be built outside the United States. The Indian, Chinese, Southeast Asian, African, and Latin American electricity transitions matter more for global emissions than the US transition does, yet most US based readers consume primarily US framed analysis. Following voices like Vibhuti Garg, Lauri Myllyvirta, Tim Buckley, and Hannah Ritchie is essential for developing a calibrated view of the global picture.

The fourth mistake is treating thought leaders as substitutes for engagement with primary sources. The best thought leaders are sign posts to the actual data, the actual reports, and the actual regulatory filings that shape the sector. Reading Kingsmill Bond's commentary on Ember reports is no substitute for reading the underlying Global Electricity Review. Following Jesse Jenkins on Twitter is no substitute for reading the underlying ZERO Lab modelling. Use the voices on this list as a way to discover the primary material, not as a replacement for it.

The fifth mistake is assuming that because someone is famous in the climate conversation, they are necessarily worth following on electricity specifically. Most people who write publicly about climate change are not specialists in power systems. The voices on this list have been selected because they are doing serious electricity sector work, not because they are popular in the broader climate space. Being able to distinguish between the two is one of the most underrated skills in becoming a sophisticated reader of the field.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Electricity Reading and Following List

The first step in building a useful electricity reading list is to subscribe to one daily and one weekly source for raw industry coverage. Utility Dive, Energy Intelligence, and Greentech Media all do strong daily coverage. The Financial Times energy team, the Wall Street Journal energy team, and the Bloomberg energy team all do strong weekly coverage. Pick one of each that fits your time budget and stick with it for at least three months before changing. Reading consistently from a small number of sources builds context faster than skimming many sources.

The second step is to subscribe to two or three Substack or newsletter sources from the voices on this list. Volts by David Roberts, Sustainability by Numbers by Hannah Ritchie, and Texas Energy and Power by Doug Lewin are the three I would recommend starting with for someone new to the field. Each translates a different domain, US politics and policy, global data, and the specific dynamics of the Texas market, into accessible weekly reading. Add Heatmap News, the Robinson Meyer led publication, for higher level synthesis.

The third step is to listen to one electricity podcast regularly. The Shift Key podcast with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins, the Volts podcast, the Energy Empire podcast with Jigar Shah, and the Cleaning Up podcast with Michael Liebreich are all excellent choices. Pick one that matches your level of technical comfort and listen for at least three months. Podcasts are particularly useful in this space because the conversational format forces hosts and guests to define their terms in ways that written work often does not.

The fourth step is to follow ten to fifteen of the voices on this list directly on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has become the most active place for electricity sector commentary, partly because the audience is the actual decision makers in utilities, regulators, and investment firms. Follow the voices whose work you find most useful, comment thoughtfully when something resonates, and resist the temptation to follow everyone immediately. Building a focused following list that fits your specific role and interests is more valuable than a wide following list that drowns out the signal.

The fifth step is to read at least one foundational book in the field. Saul Griffith's Electrify, Gretchen Bakke's The Grid, Meredith Angwin's Shorting the Grid, Brett Christophers's The Price is Wrong, and Leah Stokes's Short Circuiting Policy are all excellent choices for different aspects of the conversation. Pick the one that aligns with the part of the field you most need to understand and read it slowly with notes. The electricity sector is not a field where casual reading will build expertise. The technical and institutional vocabulary takes time, and books force the kind of sustained engagement that newsletters and podcasts cannot.

To put any of this into practice in your own organisation, the leadership team needs to be able to translate technical insight into operational decisions. Jonno White facilitates leadership team sessions that help teams work through complex industry shifts together, including in sectors going through the kind of transformation the electricity industry now faces. To discuss a workshop or executive offsite, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

How was this list compiled? The 35 people on this list were selected through a deliberate process emphasising formal credentials in the electricity sector, the quality and originality of each person's contribution to the field, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and genuine impact on how the global power system conversation has evolved. The list deliberately moves past a small number of household names that dominate every adjacent leadership listicle, in favour of fresher voices doing genuinely original electricity sector work.

Why is the list dominated by analysts and academics rather than utility CEOs? Utility executives are constrained in what they can say publicly by regulatory and shareholder considerations. The most useful public commentary on electricity tends to come from analysts, academics, regulators in advisory roles, and journalists who can engage critically with utility decisions. The trade off is that the list under represents the operational perspective, which is why pairing this list with regular reading of trade press is essential.

Where can I find the academic research these thought leaders are based on? Most of the academics on this list publish openly accessible working papers and reports through their institutional websites. The Princeton ZERO Lab, the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy, the MIT Energy Initiative, the Oxford Martin School, and Stanford's Atmosphere and Energy Program all host substantial open access libraries. Ember, RMI, and the IEA publish most of their major reports openly. The Financial Times and major US newspapers maintain paywalled archives that are nonetheless searchable for free.

What is the difference between electricity thought leadership and energy thought leadership? Energy is the broader category that includes oil, gas, nuclear, renewables, transport fuels, and industrial heat. Electricity is specifically about how power is generated, transmitted, distributed, and consumed in the form of electrons on a grid. Many voices straddle both, but the electricity conversation has its own technical vocabulary, regulatory machinery, and operational logic. Following voices who understand the specific institutional dynamics of regional transmission organisations, capacity markets, and distribution utilities is essential.

Can I hire someone to facilitate workshops or sessions on the electricity transition for my leadership team? Yes. Jonno White facilitates leadership team workshops, executive offsites, and keynote sessions that help teams in the electricity sector work through the strategic, organisational, and human dimensions of the transition. While Jonno is not an electricity industry specialist, his expertise in leadership development, difficult conversations, and team alignment is directly applicable to organisations navigating major industry shifts. To discuss a workshop, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How often should I update my electricity reading list? Review your reading list every six to twelve months. The field is changing fast enough that voices who were essential two years ago may not be the most useful voices today, and new voices are entering the conversation regularly. Resist the urge to add voices without removing some, since the goal is a focused reading practice rather than an overwhelming feed.

How do I tell the difference between a serious electricity thought leader and a generalist climate commentator? Serious electricity thought leaders use specific technical vocabulary correctly. They distinguish between energy and electricity, between capacity and energy, between firm and variable resources, between transmission and distribution. They engage with the actual institutional structures of FERC, ISOs, RTOs, and state public utility commissions. Generalist climate commentators tend to slide between concepts and skip over the regulatory machinery. The test is whether someone can talk fluently about a specific FERC order, a specific capacity auction outcome, or a specific transmission planning process, not just about the broader narrative of clean energy transition.

Final Thoughts

The age of electricity has arrived faster than the policy world, the financial world, or the broader public has caught up to. Every major question of the next decade, from artificial intelligence to manufacturing reshoring to the cost of living to the physical security of nations, increasingly runs through the electricity grid. The leaders who can read the grid clearly, who understand how power systems actually work, and who can translate between the worlds of engineering, economics, regulation, and politics will shape the choices that get made.

The 35 voices on this list are a starting point. They are not the only people doing important work, and any list compiled a year from now will look different. What unites them is a combination of technical rigour, public engagement, and genuine willingness to engage with the messiness of how electricity systems actually function rather than how they ideally should function. Following them, reading them, and engaging with their work is one of the fastest ways for someone outside the sector to develop a sophisticated understanding of the most important infrastructure question of our time.

For leaders in the electricity sector, in industries that depend heavily on electricity, or in organisations that need to make decisions in the context of a rapidly changing power system, the challenge is not just understanding the technical landscape. It is building leadership teams that can work through the strategic, organisational, and human dimensions of a transition this large. Jonno White facilitates leadership development, keynote presentations, executive offsites, and team workshops for organisations navigating exactly this kind of complex industry shift. To discuss bringing Jonno in to work with your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

The technologies are arriving. The capital is mobilising. The political conversation is shifting. The bottleneck now, as ever, is leadership. The question is whether the people running the organisations that depend on electricity, and the organisations that produce and deliver it, can rise to the moment. Reading the voices on this list is one small but important part of the answer.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Leading Thought Leaders on Renewable Energy

Capital is the primary accelerant of the clean energy transition. These thought leaders understand how money moves toward or away from clean energy, and their thinking shapes where hundreds of billions of dollars flow.

At the Rocky Mountain Institute, Kingsmill Bond has spent the last decade building one of the most compelling analytical frameworks for understanding why the clean energy transition is not just happening but is inevitable. His 2022 work Rapid Solar and Wind Growth Calls Time on the Fossil Fuel Era, co-authored with Sam Butler-Sloss and others at RMI, demonstrated that fossil fuel demand in the electricity sector had already peaked in 95 percent of OECD countries.

Solar panels are now the cheapest source of electricity in history. Wind turbines are being installed at a pace that would have seemed fantastical a decade ago. The real challenges blocking the energy transition in 2026 are political courage, permitting reform, grid integration, workforce transition, and the mobilisation of capital into the Global South. These are human challenges, not engineering ones.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-renewable-energy