Kraftwerk Berlin, the venue for the Energy Tech Summit with Octopus Energy, offered delegates a powerful lesson from history. Built by the East German government in 1961, the same year construction on the Berlin wall began, the vast turbine hall was hastily assembled to manage a crisis'the wall forced the Communist east and capitalist west to build grids that were not connected. Obsolete at reunification in 1989, it was a stark warning that walls and divisions are a choice the world can't afford to make when faced with the urgent need to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. 'The biggest risk for Europeans,' Martin Schulz, former president of the European Parliament, told the room, 'is political parties who tell citizens that lone nations are the future in a globalized, interdependent world.' He pointed out that the European Union spent '60 billion in subsidies to citizens and businesses during the recent energy price spike. 'What we need is to convince people that it is...
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