Just under a year ago, Europe’s utilities met in Portugal to discuss the future of their industry, unsure how to deal with the rise of renewables and a new breed of independent, digitally focused start-ups offering customers PV/battery solutions and peer-to-peer energy trading. At this conference, hosted by Eurelectric, speaker after speaker spoke of the need for utilities to embrace change and digitalisation — but no-one seemed quite sure what the required transformation should look like.