The Decisive Decade - 2026 Volume I: A Practitioner's Manual - What will it take to win on bankability in the next phase of energy transition

The Decisive Decade What will it take to win on bankability in the next phase of energy transition The previous decade of the energy transition was defined by ambition and the velocity of capital mobilisation. The expectation was that policy commitment and technological progress would translate, more or less directly, into delivery. That expectation has proven incomplete. Across capital-intensive green molecules and integrated infrastructure systems, the gap between announced pipelines and assets that reach financial close has persisted, and in many cases widened. This book begins from a different premise. The central constraint on the next phase of the transition is not the availability of capital, the direction of policy, or the maturity of underlying technologies. It is the ability to structure projects in forms that satisfy the precise, legally enforceable, and technically grounded requirements of capital at the point of commitment. Bankability is not a financial outcome. It is a design discipline, embedded from the earliest stages of project development and carried consistently through to execution. Shubhda Kaushik writes from a career that has moved from India to Southeast Asia to Denmark and now London, and from project finance origination at Standard Chartered Bank into strategy and operating roles at McKinsey, Bain, Reliance, and other institutions central to the energy and infrastructure economy. Across these geographies and mandates, the work has involved sustained engagement with investors, strategists, and developers, the three constituencies whose alignment, or absence of it, determines which projects reach financial close. The analysis is grounded in three disciplines that rarely sit together in the same practitioner. Project finance due diligence rigour, of the kind applied at the point where capital is committed and recourse is defined. Strategic systems thinking, which traces how decisions in one part of the value chain reshape the conditions for delivery elsewhere. And real world execution experience, drawn from the operating realities of building and financing energy assets across multiple jurisdictions. Drawing on Alternative Energy Company's proprietary bankability framework, which examines revenue certainty, infrastructure access, execution capability, and the mitigation and allocation of unmitigated risk, the book traces the structural shifts now reshaping where capital flows, who controls the systems that govern delivery, and which projects survive the journey from concept to financed asset. Across seven chapters, it examines the next act of the energy transition, the operating logic now governing project bankability, the new capital logic that has displaced the assumptions of the previous cycle, the migration of influence in complex energy systems, the corridors emerging as the primary geography of execution, the geopolitical scenario shaping investment decisions, and the movers and shapers who will determine which projects get built. This is not a polemic about whether the transition will happen, nor a celebration of its inevitability. It is a practitioner's manual for the institutions, sponsors, and investors who must now operate within the constraints the previous decade left unresolved. The argument that emerges is sober. The transition will be judged not by the projects announced, but by those that become deliverable at scale. Volume I, 2026. Published by Alternative Perspectives Alternative Energy Company