Energy Retail in 2026: Trends That Will Define the Year

Energy retail is entering a phase where long-term decisions start to take hold.

The last few years were defined by electrification, price volatility, and the rapid rollout of distributed assets. Much of that period was spent testing what would actually work in practice. In 2026, the focus shifts from testing ideas to committing to operating models. Decisions made now will shape how energy retailers operate for years, once embedded in systems, teams, and contracts.

Across Europe, retailers face the same underlying tension. Customer expectations are rising, market shares are becoming more fluid, and value is increasingly tied to how well consumption can be steered, not just supplied.

Based on what we see across markets, customers, and partners, we have identified five trends that will shape how energy retail evolves in the year ahead.

1. Consumer flexibility moves from pilots to scale

For several years, consumer flexibility lived in pilots.

Retailers tested smart EV charging, spot-price optimization, and early flexibility propositions with limited volumes. These programs proved that consumers would participate and that devices could be controlled. What they did not prove was how flexibility performs once it becomes material to the business.

In 2026, that changes.

Flexibility programs are moving beyond pilots and into scaled deployment. EV adoption alone is creating portfolios that represent gigawatts of controllable load in individual markets. At that scale, flexibility stops being a side experiment and starts affecting procurement, imbalance exposure, and customer economics.

Once programs scale, execution quality matters. Forecast accuracy, reliability, and operational discipline become visible very quickly.

2. Operations and customer support need to follow

Scaling flexibility exposes a structural gap.

Most retail organizations were built for billing and support, not for managing automated, device-driven energy behavior. As smart charging and load shifting move into the mainstream, exceptions and edge cases stop being rare. They become part of daily operations.

In 2026, successful flexibility programs are increasingly defined by what happens after launch. Retailers are investing in:

• operational visibility into devices and interventions
• support workflows that can handle automated behavior
• tooling that keeps cost to serve under control as volumes grow

Without the right operational setup, flexibility becomes expensive to run. At scale, operations and customer support determine whether flexibility actually delivers value.

3. Energy management is required to realize available value

Flexibility only creates value when it can be managed.

Rising price volatility and an increasing share of negative or near-zero wholesale prices have raised the upside of flexible assets. At the same time, that value is unevenly distributed across markets, time periods, and use cases.

In 2026, energy management functions play a more central role in consumer flexibility. Connectivity is a prerequisite for retailers. Value is realized when flexibility can be forecasted, aggregated, and acted on across portfolios and markets.

This is also where retail and trading begin to converge in practice. Consumer behavior only becomes economically meaningful when it can be translated into something energy management teams can plan around and deploy.

4. Expanding from EVs into additional DER propositionsEVs were the natural entry point for consumer flexibility.

They are flexible by design, widely adopted, and easy to communicate to consumers. But EV-only programs leave value on the table.

In 2026, flexibility expands beyond EVs. Heat pumps, batteries, solar, and hybrid household setups increasingly become part of the picture. Retailers are moving toward multi-DER portfolios that reflect how homes actually consume and produce energy.

This shift increases complexity, but it also unlocks larger and more stable value pools. It requires platforms that can handle different asset types, respect local constraints, and coordinate behavior across the household.

5. Partnerships deepen to support a functioning ecosystem

No single player can scale consumer flexibility alone.

As programs mature, the importance of partnerships becomes clearer. OEMs, energy retailers, software platforms, and system operators all influence outcomes. Fragmentation slows progress. Tight collaboration accelerates it.

In 2026, more retailers are prioritizing partnerships that strengthen the ecosystem as a whole. Better integrations, clearer responsibilities, and shared standards matter more than one-off advantages.

This favors open, extensible approaches that allow flexibility to scale across markets, asset types, and use cases, rather than solutions optimized for a single path.

What this means for energy retail in 2026

Energy retail is moving from experimentation to execution.

Flexibility is no longer something retailers test on the side. It increasingly shapes customer propositions, operational design, and how value is captured from growing fleets of distributed assets.

By 2026, flexibility is becoming part of how energy retailers actually run their businesses.