Tackling the new operating reality of the energy transition
Energy & Resources Day is a one-day event for in-house legal leaders tackling the new operating reality of the energy transition – constrained grids, pressured delivery, AI-driven demand, and geopolitics – and swapping practical playbooks that hold up.
Secure Your Spot – General Admission Now Open!
The minds shaping your experience at Energy & Resources Day
Meet Our 2026 Speakers
Marianne Khoo, Head of Legal, JERA Nex
Marianne leads legal at JERA Nex, whose portfolio of renewable energy interests includes a global offshore wind business built through JERA’s collaboration with bp, putting her at the heart of one of the energy transition’s most ambitious ventures. She knows first-hand what it takes to make a landmark energy partnership actually work: the governance, the cross-border complexity, and the daily reality of delivering renewables at scale.
Chirag Rao, Head of Legal (Development and International), Field Energy
Chirag is Head of Legal at Field, working alongside GC Elspeth Vincent in the legal engine room of one of the UK’s busiest clean-energy developers. He brings the kind of view in-house lawyers rarely get from a peer: what the work genuinely asks of you when you’re this close to the projects themselves.
Lynne Kellett, Deputy General Counsel, Sizewell C
Sizewell C is the new nuclear power station taking shape on the Suffolk coast and one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Britain. Regulated delivery at that scale is its own legal discipline: governance that holds up over decades, contracting for a project the whole country is watching, and keeping things moving inside one of the most heavily regulated environments there is.
Elspeth Vincent, General Counsel, Field Energy
Field is the battery storage business building the infrastructure renewable grid depends on. Elspeth’s world is the energy transition at its most tangible: grid bottlenecks, connection queues, and storage contracting war stories from the front line of a scaling business. As General Counsel in a company growing this quickly, very little doesn’t cross her desk: the commercial, the regulatory, and everything in between, and she’s seen first-hand what it takes for legal to keep pace with a business that can’t afford to wait.
William Lee, Director, Secure Value
With 20 years in business intelligence, integrity, due diligence and macroeconomic risk, Will spends his days analysing the trends most of us only see as headlines: sanctions, geopolitical shifts, and the security threats that now shape how energy businesses operate. He’ll bring that world into the room: what’s shifting, what it means for the industry, and what to keep an eye on next.
Ellen Lake, Senior Corporate Counsel, Business Integrity & Investigations, Rio Tinto
Ellen sits at the sharp end of one of the world’s largest mining and resources businesses, leading legal and regulatory capability on business integrity, sanctions and investigations. The metals and minerals behind (and dependent on) the energy transition come with scrutiny to match, and Ellen’s job is advising on making integrity and compliance work in practice, not as a policy on a shelf, but under pressure, across jurisdictions, when it matters most.
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In-house legal leaders
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Organisations represented in 2025
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of Energy Day 2025 delegates represented the renewables sector
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of Energy Day 2025 delegates represented the infrastructure sector
Key Themes & What to Expect in 2026
⚡The New Power Economy
Power is no longer an input cost, it’s a strategic capacity. AI and data-centre demand are pulling tech companies upstream into energy supply, changing who has leverage, how offtake is structured, and who gets power when the grid is constrained.
📋Building legal playbooks for better delivery
Delivery pressure, political pressure and new demand pressure, and legal teams asked to do far more than review contracts. How the best in-house teams build repeatable playbooks for contracting, governance, claims prevention and board-level decision framing.
🌍Geopolitics as an operating environment
Sanctions and export controls, critical mineral concentration, supply chain choke-points, cyber and physical security. When “supply chain” stops being a procurement issue and becomes a board-level resilience issue, legal sits in the middle. We’ll cover the workflows, clauses and crisis decision-making that hold up.
Energy & Resources Day Agenda
08.30 – 09.00
Registration & Breakfast
Join us to start the day with some relaxed networking over delicious breakfast and hot coffee.
09.00 – 09.45
Structured networking and a Crafty welcome
Join us to start the day with a Crafty Welcome to kick off Energy & Resources Day
09.45 – 10.10
Live wire: energy headlines, live reactions, and what actually matters for GCs
We kick the day off with some live analysis of a real-time feed of today’s biggest energy headlines. What do geopolitical stories mean for in-house teams, and which updates should in-house teams be paying especially close attention to?
John Buttanshaw, Partner | Co-Head of ESG & Impact, Travers Smith
Richard Brown, Partner, Travers Smith
Sponsored by Travers Smith
10.10 – 10.35
Financing Long-Duration Energy Storage: The New Cap and Floor Regime and the Legal Risks Behind Bankability
As wind Long-duration energy storage is emerging as a critical part of the UK's future electricity system. This session explores Ofgem's new cap and floor regime, how it is expected to unlock investment in LDES projects, and the key legal, regulatory and financing risks that in-house counsel should be anticipating as the market develops.
Sponsored by Sharpe Pritchard
10.35 – 10.55
Break
Take a break from the content to network and chat to your peers over a coffee.
Transactional Track
11.00 – 11.40
The Future of Public Investment in Energy Infrastructure
Public investment is increasingly being deployed to accelerate the energy transition. This session examines the evolving role of public-sector investors, how public capital differs from private investment, and what this means for governance, risk allocation, funding structures and project delivery.
Sponsored by Sharpe Pritchard
11.45 – 12.25
Corporate PPAs: When the deal that made sense in 2021 doesn’t work in 2026
This session will cover options for renegotiating, terminating, or restructuring a PPA that no longer works – including what rights and exposure you're dealing with, and what newer, more flexible offtake structures look like.
Risk & Disruption Track
11.00 – 11.40
Reading the meter: When headlines disrupt your energy contracts
Today's headlines on power markets, subsidies, and regulation don't stay in the news - they land directly on your contracts, from PPAs to supply agreements. This session is about spotting those signals early and knowing what they actually mean for the contracts you're already committed to.
Sponsored by Travers Smith
11.45 – 12.25
Case study – What's It Really Like, Keeping Energy Projects Moving Through Grid Reform?
The energy transition doesn't wait for the new rulebook to settle. Field's Elspeth Vincent and Chirag Rao take on what it's really like to deliver when the framework keeps shifting beneath you: where they are now, what's ahead, and the trade-offs everyone in the room is wrestling with too.
Elspeth Vincent, General Counsel, Field Energy
Chirag Rao, Head of Legal (Development and International) , Field Energy
Working Smarter Track
11.00 – 11.40
The capacity challenge: how lean energy legal teams can keep pace with the transition
Energy legal teams are supporting more projects, regulatory change and transactions than ever, often with static or reduced budgets. In this session, we’ll explore the practical ways in which in-house teams are creating capacity through AI, standardisation, playbooks, automation, smarter triage and better use of external resources.
Sponsored by LexisNexis
11.45 – 12.25
Big tech wants your power (and your weekend)
The data centre PPA boom is great news for developers and terrible news for their already overstretched legal teams. In this session, we’ll walk through how in-house legal teams can use AI workflows to not just cope, but to give their businesses a competitive edge.
12.25 – 13.25
Lunch
Take a well earned lunch break. Network with your peers over food and refreshments.
13.30 – 13.55
When the Algorithm Touches the Grid: Governing High-Risk AI in Energy
Under the EU AI Act and emerging UK policy, AI systems touching critical infrastructure (grid dispatch, curtailment, predictive maintenance on safety-critical assets) are classified as high-risk, meaning a governance failure isn't a data breach, it's a potential physical incident. This session will cover what board-level oversight actually has to look like at that bar, and how GCs steer a decision when the AI vendor, the regulator, and the safety case are pulling in different directions.
Sarah Reynolds, Commercial and Technology Partner, Shoosmiths
Sponsored by Shoosmiths
13.55 – 14.20
Building trust into the energy transition
Critical minerals (lithium, cobalt, copper) increasingly come from jurisdictions with real corruption, human rights, and state-influence risk. As demand surges, mining and resources companies are doing due diligence on new partners, jurisdictions, and joint ventures faster than ever. In this session, we'll walk through how a business integrity function actually vets a new mining relationship or JV in a higher-risk jurisdiction, and what this means for the demand and buyer side of minerals.
Ellen Lake, Senior Corporate Counsel, Business Integrity & Investigations, Rio Tinto
Transactional Track
14.30 – 15.10
Managing contract claims and disputes
How a contract is structured at signing determines what happens when a claim lands years later. This session covers the clause-level decisions that actually protect the business, and what in-house teams should get right at the drafting stage to avoid a dispute down the line.
Jerome Basdeo, Senior Solicitor, National Grid
Risk & Disruption Track
14.30 – 15.10
How can the use of storage, flexibility and onsite demand potentially alleviate grid connection delays?
Grid connection delays are one of the biggest bottlenecks facing energy and infrastructure projects right now. This session will look at how storage, flexibility, and onsite demand solutions can help projects get moving sooner.
Sponsored by Shoosmiths
Working Smarter Track
14.30 – 15.10
To Be Announced
Stay tuned for updates on this session soon...
15.10 – 15.30
Break
Take a break from the content to network and chat to your peers over a coffee.
Transactional Track
15.35 – 16.15
Case study - Building the plane while flying it: How to get your consortium/JV off the ground and keep it in the air
Marianne Khoo, Head of Legal at JERA Nex, draws on lessons and experiences from the formation of various infrastructure and energy consortiums and joint ventures over the years, including the JERA Nex bp offshore wind joint venture, to explore what it really takes to turn an ambitious partnership into a functioning business. Join us for a practical discussion around the challenges of moving from signing to delivery, including cross-border complexity, governance and stakeholder management, navigating different corporate cultures, and the day-to-day realities of making large-scale partnerships work in practice.
Marianne Khoo, Head of Legal, JERA Nex
Risk & Disruption Track
15.35 – 16.15
End-of-life and repowering for renewables assets
What happens when the wind turbines stop working? This session will cover decommissioning obligations, what planning permission says about repowering, and how to structure contracts today to avoid disputes down the line.
Working Smarter Track
15.35 – 16.15
To Be Announced
Stay tuned for updates on this session soon...
16.20 – 16.45
Geopolitics and security in energy & resources
William Lee, Director of Secure Value, spends his days tracking the sanctions, geopolitical shifts, and security threats now shaping how energy and resources businesses operate. In this session, he'll unpack what's shifting, what it means for legal and risk teams in the sector, and what to watch for next.
William Lee, Director, Secure Value
16.45 – 16.55
Crafty Wrap-up
That's a wrap on Energy & Resources Day 2026! Join us as we round up a fantastic day.
With Thanks To Our 2026 Partners
Explore partnership opportunities
Get in the room with the energy sector’s in-house legal community to meet potential customers, drive conversation, and build long-term relationships at Energy Day 2026. From speaking slots to creative booth spaces, reach out to explore our Energy Day partnership opportunities.
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Ticket Information
Make sure you don’t miss out on the second edition of Energy & Resources Day! Join us on 21st October for a day full of insight, connect and community for in-house legal leaders tackling the new operating reality of the energy transition.
Pricing Tiers
General Admission: £95 + VAT (until 07/10/2026)
Last Chance: £125 + VAT (08/10/2026 – 21/10/2026)
Are You Currently Between Roles?
Being between roles can be a challenging time and we believe that’s exactly when community matters most. If you’re currently in this position and would like to join us at an upcoming event, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to help where we can.
