Blog: Making Energy with Love. Powering Lasting Peace.

Making Energy with Love. Powering Lasting Peace.

The 26th World Energy Congress, in Rotterdam, April, 2024

February 14 is Valentine’s Day in many parts of the world.

Energy has never been a romantic story. And yet it has become a story about balancing the love of power with the power of love.

Despite all the talk about energy security, new technologies and rising prices, energy is a purposeful, people-centric, adaptive system.

It is now a matter of WHEN - not IF - societies will be hit by new energy shocks – and shocks arising from instabilities within new power systems.

This year’s forthcoming World Energy Issues Monitor shows that peace and stability is the number one concern keeping energy leaders awake at night.

Top action priorities — strengthening grids, improving regional connectivity, and deploying flexible storage solutions — signal a shift in attention to the inherent instability and rising systems costs associated with scaling new power systems.

No amount of data, however, can speak for itself. Actionable insights emerge through the process of storytelling, conversation, and exchange of lived experiences. None of which can be digitalized or downloaded.

As the world energy systems leadership community, we can and do, make sense together – learning about what is happening in increasingly diverse regions about the pace, pathways and emerging possibilities of delivering more energy for billions of lives and a healthy planet.

Meeting the moment – a Dunlop moment

A century ago, Daniel Nicol Dunlop founded the World Energy Council with a vision of an associative and equitable world energy system and to secure energy for peace.

The question then: How can the world benefit from the electrification revolution without scarce energy resources becoming a driver of conflict?

By the 1990s, that vision had broadened into associative, equitable AND ecological energy systems, with the rise of global environmental consciousness and a new collaborative imperative of sustainable development.

Today, a global AI-electrification super cycle is underway.

Good progress in closing energy poverty gaps with basic access to electricity contrast with new concerns about underestimated and growing energy deficits in all regions.

Good news about the continued momentum in energy transitions contrasts with headlines about the failure to bend the global emissions curve. Climate change momentum implies overshoot of 1.5oC is inevitable - and hopefully temporary. Mother Nature doesn’t negotiate.

And a return of national energy security interests has triggered a global spiral of mistrust, misunderstanding and mutual hesitation.

Trilemma in Transitions

Energy systems trade-offs evolve, but do not disappear, throughout the processes of energy systems additions, transitions and transformations.

Managing the real and connected challenges of energy security, affordability, and sustainability is not easy, but failing to do so is a recipe for disaster.

Each dimension of the World Energy Trilemma framework is evolving:

• Rethinking resilience – a shift from hardening assets to external events to the inherent instability within new power systems.
• Recalibrating affordability – with attention to rising systems costs and the investment gap between energy supply/demand cost stack and energy payment stack.
• Resetting the access baseline – not a single connection or lightbulb, enabling dignity and economic agency
• Reimagining sustainable development – avoiding ecological crises with attention to waste, water and atmospheric carbon removals, and leveraging demand transformation as a lever for reconfiguring supply.

A World Energy Congress year – being and becoming the change we want to see

The Riyadh World Energy Congress, October 12-15th, is a pivotal moment to pull a new vision of associative equitable and ecological world energy systems leadership together under the theme: Inspiring Transformations, Delivering Transitions.

Imagine the moment

You are part of the world energy community, about to step onto a global stage. What’s the one message you want the world to hear? What’s the conversation you want to have? And who needs to be at the table to translate ambitious inspirations into meaningful actions?

Riyadh is where energy heritage and new horizons will combine with realistic hope to shape the future of energy together and for generations to come.

This is the moment – a Dunlop moment – to move the needle from dialogue to delivery, from hesitation into collaboration, from disaster to direction.

The world needs a new kind of global energy leadership.

Wired with love.

Powering lasting peace.

Securing reliable, affordable and productive energy access for billions of better lives and a healthy planet.