On 19 November 2025, Asper hosted its annual Investor Day in London – bringing together our network of institutional investors for a day of insight sharing, discussion, and reflection on the investment landscape shaping the energy transition.

This year, we refreshed the format: focus sessions on Asper’s heat strategies took place earlier in the day, followed by a plenary designed to step back and look more broadly at market forces – before returning to further sessions on the wind investments in the afternoon.

The plenary combined three elements: a guest speaker perspective, a market recap, and a set of detailed case studies showing how these themes translate into practical investment decisions across Asper’s platforms.

Market Insights: The Energy Transition’s Reinforcing Drivers

In the market overview, Asper briefly revisited last year’s central message: while net zero has faced visible political and regulatory headwinds, the underlying momentum of the transition remains strong – driven by a set of powerful structural forces.

Three drivers continue to define the market context:

• Electrification: Electricity demand in Europe is rising again after decades of stagnation, supported by heating, industry, data centres, and transport. Forecasts point to around 40% growth by 2030, signalling a systemic change rather than a temporary spike.
• Security of supply: Europe has reduced Russian gas dependency but still imports significant volumes of gas from elsewhere. Gas consumption is falling, yet it continues to set power prices much of the time – accelerating the push for renewables through reforms in markets.
• Affordability: Renewables have moved beyond subsidies, but heat is now the “next frontier” where solutions such as heat networks and waste-heat reuse are key to replace fossil fuels in an affordable way.

Asper again used the metaphor of a Newton’s cradle to illustrate how these forces transmit through the system – affecting industry, policy, and capital allocation – while acknowledging that the path remains bumpy, shaped by regulatory shifts, bottlenecks, and political surprises.

Two Themes Rising to the Foreground: Reindustrialisation and Cooling

Two developments became more prominent in 2025 – reinforcing the overall picture and sharpening the investment opportunity set.

Industry, defence, and demand growth

A renewed focus on industrial autonomy and electrification, defence and infrastructure is beginning to directly influence power demand.

Cooling as a new frontier

Cooling is emerging as a major driver of electricity demand growth.

For investors, this creates a dual opportunity: rising demand for low-carbon power, and deeper integration between power systems and thermal efficiency – particularly through waste heat recovery.

Guest Speaker Perspective: Heat Decarbonisation at Scale

To broaden the lens beyond Asper’s portfolio, the plenary featured Professor John Rosenow (University of Oxford), who spoke about the global challenge – and investable opportunity – of heat decarbonisation.

Key points included:

• Heat represents a substantial share of global energy use and has historically received less attention than electricity, though that is now changing rapidly.
• The replacement challenge is significant, with hundreds of millions of boilers globally that will need to transition away from fossil fuels – alongside industrial heat systems still dominated by fossil energy.
• Economics often hinge on the electricity-to-gas price ratio (“spark spread”), shaping adoption of heat pumps and other electrification pathways.
• Major opportunity exists in improving system efficiency – reducing “rejected energy” – and in scaling solutions that capture ambient and waste heat, including from industrial sites and data centres.

Case Studies: How Themes Translate into Real Assets

Asper presented several case studies from its investments – designed to show “the nitty gritty” of what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Waste heat integration: from theory to delivery

Asper shared examples across its heat platforms that demonstrate the conditions required to make waste heat integration work at scale:

• Why do some projects fail:
  • The asymmetry of incentives between the waste heat supplier (for whom it is an accessory business) and the off-taker (for whom it is core to its operations)
  • The relative novelty of waste heat offtake, which leads to the absence of known contractual structures and precedents
• And other projects succeed: Asper shared real-life examples of:
  • An operational data centre supplying waste heat connected to an existing heating network.
  • How new-generation, new liquid-cooled data centres can reduce heat production costs by up to 40%.

Across these examples, there were four recurring screening factors for waste heat sources: temperature, volume, proximity, and temporal matching.

Power Flexibility: the evolution of UK batteries

The plenary also explored the maturing UK battery market – how early revenues were dominated by ancillary services, how markets evolved following the volatility of 2022, and how the “second wave” is being shaped by falling capex, longer duration systems, and improving route-to-market structures.

A key highlight was the announcement of Asper’s acquisition of a 50MW, 3-hour ready-to-build battery project (“Buley Battery”), targeting energisation in the first half of 2027, with returns structured around a contracted base case and meaningful upside exposure.

Looking Ahead

Investor Day 2025 reinforced the view that the energy transition is being propelled by structural momentum – electrification, security, and affordability.

Across Asper’s platforms, the focus remains on building and operating scalable infrastructure businesses – where technical delivery, careful commercial structuring, and alignment with counterparties unlock long-term value, resilience, and impact.

Please get in touch at investorrelations@asper-im.com