Two days in Heek: real conversations about where UK energy is going next

If you wanted to understand where the UK energy conversation is heading, the place to be last week was Heek. 

Not many company trips finish day one on a tractor-drawn wagon, jacket optional, with someone trying to work out which colleague has just sat on the upturned bucket. That part happened. So did the substance. The 2Gether Innovation and Networking Event 2026 ran across 20 and 21 May at 2G's headquarters in Heek, and the wagon ride to dinner gave away more about the format than the agenda did. The whole thing runs less like a glossy trade show and more like a long working visit you happen to be welcomed into, which is what brought UK consultants, developers and operators across the channel last week. 

The substance earns the trip. 2G has thirty-one years focused on CHP, with the afilia heat-pump range now alongside it. Over 10,000 installations across 50 countries. Six hundred systems running in the UK at 96 per cent fleet availability. The world's first 100 per cent hydrogen CHP, commissioned back in 2014. The UK's only operating hydrogen CHP, installed at Kirkwall Airport in October 2024. The highest Rolls-Royce MTU authorisation in the country, including commissioning rights on the larger blocks. None of that needed saying in the room. It was the reason people had come. 

The factory tour does the thing no spec sheet ever does. It is one thing to specify plant from a datasheet. It is something else to stand half a metre from an agenitor mid-build, with four test stands lined up behind it, and ask the engineer alongside you what fails first, what lasts longest, and which installations still look good fifteen years on. The hi-vis "VIP, visitor in production" vest reads at first like a joke at your expense, then turns out to mean exactly what it says. You are the guest. The engineers, fitters and test-stand teams know the answers. 

The sessions stayed on that same floor in spirit. The argument running through them was simple enough. Five years ago, the question for on-site energy was whether the technology worked. It does. What people are asking now is how things fit together. How a CHP integrates with the wider energy system and responds to changing site demands. How an industrial heat pump with a starting current seven to ten times its operating current can sit on the same island without tripping the engines. How a controller decides which asset moves first when the grid disappears at three in the morning.

The agenda played that argument out across five voices. Jon Dean (Head of Operations, 2G UK) opened on island mode and battery storage, walking through the 2G Master controller and the rather understated point that its source code sits in the box and is owned outright. Giles Vidgeon (Sales Manager) carried the same thread into data centres, where CHP, BESS and afilia together deliver a four-output system; power, recovered heat, cooling, and COP-amplified heat. Ulrich Brinkmann (Head of Heat Pumps, 2G AG) took it inside the heat pump itself. 2G's USP, as he puts it, is that 2G controls both hydraulic sides of the installation under one master controller, and the GreenCube concept names the integrated product. Mark Holtmann (Managing Director) closed the technical sessions on gas blending and project finance. External speakers from ENEL X and Now Then Energy brought the regulatory and wholesale layer, the one that decides whether a strong technical case actually pays. 

The room had widened, too. Estates teams, manufacturers, hotels and data-centre developers were all there. Hotels protecting guest experience through grid events. Manufacturers balancing process continuity against fluctuating power prices, and asking whether heat pumps now reach the supply temperatures their processes actually need. Data-centre operators looking past standby diesels at genuinely dispatchable on-site generation. Estates teams trying to grow without waiting four to ten years for a grid connection. 

Underneath all of it sat a quieter shift in how operators are thinking about on-site generation. Backup used to be insurance. Equipment that sat idle until something went wrong. It is increasingly active infrastructure: plant that contributes to the site economics every day, and steps in when the grid will not. Hydrogen-readiness and gas blending sit inside the same shift. For a while they read as future-planning items. Permitting and the Medium Combustion Plant Directive have dragged them into present-day decisions, and developers were being asked, on the slab today, whether the system still earns its place a decade from now. 

The honest conversations happened around the technical content rather than inside it. Over dinner. In the bar afterwards. On the production floor between sessions, where a developer trying to size a multi-megawatt island can corner a German engineer who has actually commissioned three of them. That geometry is what the event is built around, and it works because 2G genuinely lets you near the people who build, service and refurbish the equipment. 

Two days isn't long. It is long enough to leave with a clearer view of where UK on-site energy is heading, a stack of new contacts on the consultant side, and a working theory about how the same team builds the engines, writes the control software, and still finds an afternoon to run a tractor ride. 

The people who travelled already had the technical case for 2G in their heads before they boarded. What they came for, and what they left with, was the sort of conversation that does not happen on a stand-up panel. Honest answers. Hot food. An unhurried atmosphere. Peers who actually do the work. Less about what is next, more about what survives contact with a live operating site. 

The bus back to the airport, by the way, was notably less interesting than the wagon.