Energy, water, and affordability are jointly critical to long-term security, resilience, and investable growth. For investors and FDI decision makers, treating them as a single, integrated system is central to risk management and value creation.

Energy and water infrastructure are structurally interdependent: energy production needs water, and water treatment and distribution are energy intensive. Ignoring this linkage in project design or policy planning increases operational risk, regulatory exposure, and the likelihood of stranded or underperforming assets.

Affordability is the third, often overlooked, pillar. When the cost of energy and water is high or volatile, it constrains demand, limits network effects, and excludes whole segments of the population and productive economy. That erosion of affordability ultimately undermines social and political stability, and with it, the security and resilience on which long term investments depend.

Affordability also determines the commercial viability and scaling speed of low carbon technologies. Green hydrogen, for example, is positioned as a key lever for industrial and mobility decarbonisation. Yet without reliably affordable clean electricity and clean water, hydrogen projects struggle to reach cost competitiveness, slowing deployment and delaying decarbonisation pathways that many investment theses currently depend on.

Grid and market design compound these dynamics. The bottleneck in many jurisdictions is not generation capacity but grid connection, utilisation, and flexibility. Intermittent renewables such as wind and solar require significant grid scale storage to provide stable supply. Utility scale battery parks, while essential, add capital cost and market complexity. When they are primarily used for price arbitrage, value capture tends to favour traders over end users, keeping retail and industrial tariffs elevated and limiting affordability-driven demand growth.

From a systems perspective, the core constraint is not simply adding more hardware but enabling greater flexibility and smarter dispatch across the whole energy–water system. The investable opportunity lies in optimising relationships and control (data, digital, pricing, and regulation) rather than only scaling physical assets. Well-designed system relationships can lower delivered cost, reduce volatility, and enhance resilience, thereby improving risk adjusted returns.

Despite measurable progress in renewables and in reducing the energy intensity of desalination, the pace remains too slow relative to climate and development goals, and true affordability is still distant in many markets. This suggests the need for a step change, not just incremental optimisation: reframing the question from “What is achievable within current constraints?” to “What is possible if we redesign constraints?” For investors, that means prioritising solutions that enhance both efficiency (process and asset performance) and effectiveness (outcomes in terms of cost, access, and emissions).

If efficiency is pursued mainly by scaling incumbent models: bigger plants, larger pipelines, more of the same, without redesigning incentives and metrics; waste, cost, and systemic risk stay embedded. In that scenario, affordability gets pushed further out in time, and climate targets that underpin many transition strategies lose credibility. That is a material risk to portfolios reliant on orderly transition assumptions.

As the world exceeds the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, the conversation often shifts to resetting targets upward. A more investable framing is to ask: What portfolio of technologies, business models, and policies can bring us back toward 1.5 degrees and below, while improving affordability and stability? Capital will increasingly favour jurisdictions and projects that can credibly answer that question.

Affordability is not a concession; it is a strategic enabler of scale, innovation, and system stability. Economies require affordable energy and water to remain attractive for productive investment, industrial development, and human capital retention. Persistently high and volatile costs heighten political and regulatory risk and weaken the long term investment case.

For investors and FDI, the key is to back integrated solutions and policy environments that:

• Treat energy, water, and affordability as a single system.
• Prioritise flexible, dispatchable, and digitally coordinated infrastructure over purely volumetric expansion.
• Align metrics toward outcome effectiveness (access, resilience, decarbonisation, stability) as well as process efficiency.

Such an approach builds a reinforcing cycle: continuous improvement and innovation drive better operational performance, which in turn strengthens affordability, stability, security, and resilience. This feedback loop supports sustained returns, reduces downside risk, and enhances the long term viability of investments in complex, climate exposed markets.

In short, for capital seeking durable value, the most attractive opportunities will be those that improve affordability while deepening the resilience and security of the underlying energy-water systems.

Christopher Gleadle

CEO SV-Electra

* John Maynard Keynes. (1942).