World Energy Week 2025: Dr Angela Wilkinson Opening Address

World Energy Week 2025: Dr Angela Wilkinson Opening Address

As prepared for delivery at the Opening Ceremony of World Energy Week 2025 in Panama

Excellencies, Members, Colleagues and Friends,

It is my honour, as Secretary General of the World Energy Council, to welcome you to World Energy Week 2025 here in Panama City.

First, my sincere thanks to the National Secretariat of Energy and our Panama Member Committee for hosting us. We look forward to welcoming Secretary Rodríguez to the stage soon.

 And thanks to each of you for choosing to be here – your presence makes this moment relevant and meaningful.

For more than a century, the World Energy Council has convened people and power for the common good. Today, as the world's leading and most globally inclusive and intergenerational   energy community, we continue that legacy under the theme: Energising Connections, Powering a Healthy Planet.

Over the next two days, we will learn about what is happening and share our experiences and wisdom. We will address the pressing, multiple and connected challenges of global energy leadership. And we will commit to delivering more and better energy for billions of lives and a healthy planet, together.

A World in Transition

The world order we knew when we convened for the 2024 World Energy Congress has ended.

The story of energy is being rewritten. The pace of change is faster than ever.

• Mother Nature is reshuffling the planetary deck, disrupting fundamental life support systems - food, water, and energy.
• Surging power demand from artificial intelligence and data centres is revealing growing energy deficits.
• Affordability challenges weigh heavily on all societies.

The outlook is for an exponentially electrified and wired world, a warm and wobbly future with and emerging reality of a two-track world: as some nations race towards accelerating clean power and others double down on fossil fuel security.

As we rewire the world, the physical connections and integration challenges are being overshadowed by the importance of human relations, collective wisdom and collaborative imperatives. This is why humanising energy is key to realising success beyond the usual technology and supply-centric conversations and engaging with demand, access and affordability as collaborative opportunities.

The question is not whether this is a turning point or a breaking point. It is: how do we work with others – engage the pace of learning emerging from the east and secure more and better energy for billions of lives and a healthy planet?

Everyone in this room has a role to play in enhancing energy literacy, activating the pull of modern energy societies and moving forward together.

Panama’s Symbolism

Panama itself is a living reminder of what people can achieve when they dare to dream, connect and persist in collaboration. The Canal was not built overnight. It took decades of vision, international effort, and courage. And it changed the world – linking oceans, facilitating trade, and sharing new ideas.

That same spirit is what we need as the stewards of the global energy commons in an ear where soft power is being denied in the new confluences of hard, political and economic power games.

Energy is a system, not a single technology or commodity. Energy transitions and additions are not sprints, but intergenerational, international relay races. Our responsibility is not just to run our part well – but to coach each other and to pass the baton.

Our greatest opportunity is to learn from regional diversity, connect the dots, and equip the next generation of leaders to flourish.

Energy is much more than an industry. It is the lifeblood of civilisation, humanity's design envelope for prosperity, security, and planetary health. Where energy flows, ecological civilisations can grow and flourish together.

Shared Responsibility

Each of us in this room shares responsibility for the future of energy.

Our common goal is clear: more and better energy for billions of decent lives on a healthy planet.

Managing multiple emerging energy pathways is essential. There is no one size fits all solution. No one single country, company or community can achieve success alone, nor all in one go.

How we work together, and who we choose to work with, will define success.

Look around this room: sectors, geographies, genders, generations. United by our differences, diversity is our strength and source of innovation and leadership learning. Through dialogue and by sharing experiences the World Energy Council exists – and why World Energy Week matters.

Moving Forward Together

As the world’s pre-eminent and most globally inclusive, integrated and connected energy community, the Council remains committed to promoting the sustainable supply and use of energy for the benefit of all people.

But our role is evolving. In today’s noisy and turbulent digital world, our ability to make sense and move with the times, depends less on static studies and classic industry events.

We are curating collective intelligence and enabling new collaborative competencies -  sharpening our analogue edge – to move humanity into a new safe space – progressing multiple energy transitions and additions pathways.

We pioneered the World Energy Trilemma approach twenty years ago as a practical global framework for integrating local actions. The insights we provide on integrated policy performance and regional diversity are essential and now used in over 120 countries.

As we journey to more and better energy futures this rear-view policy mirror, however, is sufficient to guide our journey.

We are calling on our world energy community to cocreate a new World Energy Compass – to guide pathfinding towards ecological civilisations and inclusive, circular and flourishing energy societies. 

This combination of collective wisdom, practical frameworks and collaborative competencies is what sets us apart as a visionary and pragmatic  shaper of a new world energy narrative.

Much has changed since our founding. But powering billions of better lives and a healthy planet requires human collective wisdom to keep pace with the accelerating pace of developments in Artificial Intelligence and new collaborative competencies to offset the risk of exclusive competitive advantages.

Let this week remind us that by daring to dream, connect and persist in collaboration we can change the world for the better – just as Panama has done.

Let us leave not only with new ideas, but as world energy community with renewed commitment to act together.

Thank you.