In the three years since The Australian Financial Review ESG Summit was held for the first time, the idealism of the environmental, social and governance movement has run into the hard realities of execution. The end of cheap money to invest, the cost of living crisis, and energy price shock have dramatically changed the order of priority for customers, governments and investors.

When prices are sky high, sustainability might have to wait. And there has now been a sharp realisation that many technologies and energy infrastructure transformations like hydrogen fuels, and even fast charging grids for EVs, are a lot easier to talk about than to actually create.