Published in the magazine Industrial Ecology at the beginning of October 2026.
At the same time, it is expected to fly through flexibilization, the integration of new technologies, technical regulation, decentralization, standardization, and harmonization across Europe. And to make it as comfortable as possible for all of us, the energy sector is also expected to complete liberalization and democratization as nobly as possible.
It is precisely these last two "izations"—liberalization and democratization—that we discussed with Jan Krišpín, CEO of ORGREZ, because it seems it is not exactly a walk in the park.
1. How is Europe, or the Czech Republic, succeeding in pushing the energy sector through all these "izations"?
I would say very unevenly.
In the field of new power plants, we are succeeding in the transformation relatively well. Europe has managed to create conditions for the construction of photovoltaics, wind, batteries, and other decentralized sources very quickly. Technologies have become cheaper, capital has flowed in, and investors have learned to build quickly. The problem with speed is that it usually comes at the expense of quality, and that, especially in the case of residential PV systems, will be a ticking time bomb for the next decade.
However, it is significantly worse in the area of system balance.
Building a power plant is one thing. Ensuring that the entire system functions stably and affordably every hour of the year is another. And that is exactly where I think we are hitting a wall.
We are seeing very unpleasant differences between prices during times of energy surplus and shortage. At one part of the day, we have so much electricity that its price drops very low or into the negative, while a few hours later, we are scrambling to find it at a high cost. This is quite telling information that economically successful investments in individual power plants do not automatically create an economically functioning energy system.
Alongside this comes the problem of grids. We are decentralizing production much faster than we can change the infrastructure that connects it. The grid is softening, energy flows are changing, some of its natural stabilizing properties are being lost, and in many places, we are hitting the saturation point for further connections.
And this is where I think the fundamental difference between the transformation of individual technologies and the transformation of the energy sector as a system becomes apparent.
We can build a photovoltaic power plant or a battery in a matter of months. We plan and implement a transmission line, a substation, or a major grid element over more than 10 years.
So yes, the transformation is progressing, but its individual parts are moving at different speeds. And unfortunately, the energy sector is exactly the field where the speed of the whole is ultimately determined by its slowest link.
2. What exactly should we imagine under the terms liberalization and democratization?
Liberalization meant opening up the energy sector to competition. Historically, the energy sector was vertically organized—production, grids, trade, and the customer were all part of a relatively closed system. Gradually, we separated production and trade from the regulated infrastructure, opened the market, and gave customers the power of choice. But even then, we began to lose a certain degree of coordination of the energy sector as a whole.
Democratization has gone even further.
The customer is no longer just someone who consumes electricity and pays the bill. They can produce it, store it, share it, manage their consumption, provide flexibility, or participate in the energy market through aggregation.
And in principle, that is correct.
However, I think we have forgotten one thing on our path toward the liberalization and democratization of the energy sector.
The main prerequisite for true democracy is individual responsibility.
The right to do something must also be linked to responsibility for the consequences of one's own decisions. And this is precisely where I believe we have reached a certain crisis of responsibility. Instead of asking, "What does the energy system need and where does it need it?", we have too often asked, "What can we build and what makes financial sense for us?" It is also increasingly common to hear that the system favors one technology or does not subsidize another enough.
The result was that we started building almost everything that could be built and that looked good in a spreadsheet. Not necessarily what the system needed at that specific place and time.
Today, therefore, we find ourselves in a very tangled situation. We want to build a new source, but we run into grid constraints. We want to electrify consumption, but we run into insufficient capacity. We want to install a battery, but we have to deal with connection issues, operating modes, and market developments. We want to expand industrial operations, but we suddenly find that the problem is not the technology itself, but the infrastructure around it.
We can democratize the energy sector. But responsibility for its functioning does not disappear through democratization.
3. What are the pros and cons?
I believe the pros of liberalization and democratization are enormous. Competition, innovation, and a huge amount of private capital have entered the energy sector. Technologies and business models have emerged that would have developed much more slowly in the old centralized system due to a lack of motivation. And households have played a very significant role in this.
Just a few years ago, self-generation of electricity was a topic primarily for energy companies and industry. Today, an average family is dealing with photovoltaics, batteries, heat pumps, or electric vehicles. From the perspective of society's involvement in energy, this is a fascinating change. But it also has a flip side.
The decision-making of individual investors is, in the best case, naturally driven by their own economics. A household looks at the return on investment for photovoltaics. An investor looks at the return on a battery. A developer looks at available capacity. An industrial company looks at energy prices. In the worst case, they follow a trend and buy themselves an expensive hobby.
However, none of the participants are responsible for optimizing the entire power system. And this, in my opinion, is one of the biggest misconceptions in the current energy sector. An economically advantageous model for one power plant does not necessarily mean an economically advantageous contribution to the functioning of the entire system. The energy sector must still simultaneously meet three basic attributes – it must be economical, safe, and environmentally acceptable. If we optimize a project solely based on the economics of a specific investor, it may bring costs into the system that they do not see in their own business plan at all. The need to strengthen the grid, ensure backup power, flexibility, stability, or address new operating modes. The project's economics then look good, among other reasons, because someone else is bearing part of the actual costs. And when thousands or tens of thousands of individual decisions head in the same direction, a completely different problem can arise than the one each individual investor sees.
A typical example is the combination of photovoltaics, batteries, heat pumps, and electromobility. Each of these technologies can make perfect sense on its own. However, their mass adoption dramatically changes the nature of production, consumption, and grid load.
In other words: we built everything we could very quickly. Now we are starting to realize that we did not always build what we needed with the same consistency.
The role of energy policy and regulation is therefore not to decide for every investor which technology they should buy. However, it must set the environment so that the sum of a million individually rational decisions also leads to a rational result for the entire system. And I believe this must include a simple principle: whoever brings a significant externality into the system through their decision should also participate proportionately in the costs of resolving it.
4. Projects implemented for political convenience, or just to "make the numbers work," now have their negative consequences. What are some examples?
I don't think we should point a finger at one specific technology and call it the problem. I see the problem more in the way we have promoted certain technologies (by "we," I mean the political scene). In recent years, we have created exceptionally strong regulatory, subsidy, and social support for renewable energy sources, while simultaneously pushing for a rapid change in heating methods and further electrification of consumption. Each of these steps has its own logic. However, the energy infrastructure has not been adapting at the same speed.
We support the installation of photovoltaics, but the grid it is supposed to connect to has limited capacity. We support heat pumps, but they significantly change peak electricity demand in a given location. We are adding batteries, charging infrastructure, and other electrical appliances, but the local distribution grid was designed for a completely different operating mode. And then comes the surprise that there is nowhere left to connect another project.
This is not a failure of photovoltaics or heat pumps. It is the consequence of having very intensively stimulated one part of the energy system without paying the same attention to its backbone. Yet, the grid is not something that can be quickly retrofitted.
The construction and modernization of lines, transformer stations, and substations have long permitting and implementation timelines. And physics will not grant us any exceptions just because a political or subsidy program is running faster or because there is louder outcry. In my opinion, we have too often turned energy policy into a set of individual subsidy and regulatory tasks.
We need to start looking at it again as one interconnected system.
5. On the other hand, there could probably be projects that would suit our energy sector in every possible way but haven't been implemented. Are there any such projects?
Certainly, and I don't think it's just about one specific project. It is interesting to ask a different question: "Who is even supposed to invest in infrastructure with a lifespan of forty, sixty, or eighty years?" For such investments, it is difficult to imagine them happening entirely without state involvement.
Not because the state should own or build everything, but because strategic energy infrastructure must survive a series of governments, regulatory changes, and political priorities during its lifetime. When making decisions, a private investor must consider not only technical and market risks but also what rules will be in place in ten, twenty, or thirty years. And that is a period spanning several election cycles.
The greater the regulatory uncertainty, the higher the expected return for the investor, or the lower the willingness to carry out such an investment at all. I think this is clearly visible in the cautious approach to building new large-scale sources, but it is equally important for grids, transformer stations, long-term storage, heating infrastructure, and other strategic projects.
The energy market is very good at optimizing operations and short-term decisions. However, it is much less effective at providing investment signals for projects whose economics must be calculated across several generations of energy policy.
And this is exactly where I believe the state must accept its role. It doesn't have to dictate every technological solution. But it must create a sufficiently stable framework so that strategic infrastructure can be planned, financed, and actually built.
That is why, for example, I wouldn't look at the cancelled tender for the completion of Temelín solely through the question of whether one specific economic model worked out at the time. It is more of a reminder of how difficult it is to evaluate an investment with a lifespan of decades solely through the lens of the current market and current political reality.
6. How do we get out of this?
I think the first step is surprisingly simple. To stop for a moment.
The energy transition has gained tremendous speed in recent years. And when you have been running in one direction for a long time, it is sometimes wise to stop, look around, and verify whether you are still heading where you originally intended. I don't mean stopping investments or returning to the old energy model. That world no longer exists. I mean an honest inventory of what we have built, what we are building, where the limits are starting to appear, and what we will truly need in ten, twenty, or thirty years.
The first generation of the transition was largely about targets. How many renewables we install, how much we reduce emissions, how much we electrify consumption. I believe the second generation must be about system functionality.
We must ask not only how much a given technology produces and how much it costs, but also when it produces, where it produces, how quickly it can react, what it does to the grid, what flexibility it brings, and what happens if ten thousand other entities make the same investment.
We must also reconnect the planning of production, consumption, and infrastructure and stop pretending that these are three separate problems that we can dismiss in a footnote as having been neglected. The laws of physics couldn't care less about that.
In my view, technological neutrality does not mean that all technologies are the same. It means that we evaluate them based on the actual service they provide to the energy system. We will also need to be much more honest in dealing with the externalities of individual decisions. If a new project triggers the need for significant investments in the grid, backup capacities, or other system services, these costs should not be automatically spread among all other energy market participants. I believe the principle should be that whoever introduces an externality into the system should also bear a significant portion of the cost of financing it. Only then do we get a more realistic economic picture of which solutions are truly advantageous for the energy sector.
In the energy sector, we have become very good at calculating the price of a megawatt-hour. Now, we must relearn how to calculate the price of reliability, availability, and stability. And then, with a clean slate, decide where we want to go from here. Because Excel can handle anything. Technology and physics are not so forgiving.
7. What role does ORGREZ play in this era of, let’s say, systemic uncertainty?
I think that in recent years, technology, the market, regulation, and operations have not only drifted apart but are, in some places, engaged in what is almost trench warfare.
Producers want to connect more sources. Grid operators are trying to figure out how much more the system can handle. Consumers want cheap and reliable energy. The regulator is trying to piece all these interests together. And together, we are all testing the limits of what generation, the grid, and the consumer can endure. That is exactly where I see the role of ORGREZ.
When I ask myself why ORGREZ was actually founded, the answer is surprisingly simple.
To make the energy sector work better.
ORGREZ was founded nearly seventy years ago in an energy landscape completely different from the one we have today. Technologies have changed fundamentally several times. Fuels, sources, environmental requirements, regulations, and trading methods have all shifted. However, I believe our core mission has never changed. And it is according to that mission that ORGREZ has been evolving in its form throughout all these years.
In recent decades, this primarily meant measuring and optimizing specific equipment. Today, the energy sector is much more complex, and ORGREZ must adapt to this once again. We need to understand the technical reality of equipment and grids. We must be able to prepare and implement changes to them. We need to work with data and control systems. We must understand operations. But at the same time, we must understand the market, regulation, and the rules of the energy system. Because the problem with the energy sector today lies somewhere between technology, the grid, pricing, operations, and the rules by which all participants make their decisions.
And that is exactly the direction in which we are moving.
From improving individual equipment and operations to working with all the layers that determine how the energy sector functions, including the conditions under which producers, consumers, and grid operators make their decisions.
We do not want to be, and have never been, proponents of a single technology. We have always stood on the side of a functioning energy sector. And I believe that is more essential today than ever before.
