Reflections from Panama: Meaningful movement towards more and better energy futures
This article was originally published by Dr Angela Wilkinson on LinkedIn.
Hope is not optimism. It’s courage in motion.
This week, I had the privilege of welcoming more than 400 energy leaders from across the Americas and around the world to Panama World Energy Week, under the theme “Energising Connections, Powering a Healthy Planet”.
In today’s noisy, digitally-enabled energy world, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. From our interactive and generative dialogues, a new common-sense emerged.
The outlook is for a globally warmer and societally wobblier world – more volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous – and an increasingly demand-driven context for progressing exponentially wired, integrated and connected, safe and affordable energy systems.
The language of national energy sovereignty may sound strong, but isolationism is not a substitute for real energy security. Energy abundance will come from interdependence done wisely: and for that to happen our existence as a globally connected, locally rooted, purposeful actioned world energy community matters more than ever.
Seeing the Bigger Picture in a Digitally Noisy Era
Our interactive exchanges in Panama helped surface new, critical and collective insights:
1. An Electrification Super Cycle, but not an All-Electric Future – A worldwide surge in electrification is underway, driven by the dual demand for human development and artificial intelligence. Yet an all-electric future is neither near nor inevitable.
Delivering global energy transitions (plural) at speed and scale requires ‘more and better energy’ supplies – a broader range of renewable technologies, nuclear and clean molecules – plus massive supplies of other materials to build new power systems and meet the connected challenges of energy security, affordability, and sustainability.
Our pioneering World Energy Trilemma framework is still relevant after 20 years and evolving to meet new demands for resilience and justice.
2. Realising Success Beyond Supply — Building Infrastructure and Capabilities – Energy transitions also depend on grid and storage infrastructure and human skills and capabilities.
Regional cooperation, fair and inclusive supply chains, major investment in workforce skilling and reskilling is needed in parallel with investment in clean power supply, stronger grids and flexible storage solutions,
The shift in mindset from linear, supply-centric to dynamic, demand-driven energy systems which can meet the exponential growth of energy demand in digital societies is mindboggling – but with adaptive capacity and shared learning, we can prepare wisely for what’s next.
3. Collective Intelligence: Trust as the Invisible Infrastructure – Even in a world of AI and big data, human judgement remains essential.
Energy transitions accelerate with trust and can only succeed when decisions are guided by practical wisdom, empathy, and fairness.
Trustworthiness is a missing global value chain and the process that makes global progress possible.
4. Collaborative Competence in Navigating a Two-Track World – We’re entering a two-track world, with some countries advancing clean power systems, and others doubling down on fossil fuel security.
Collaboration isn’t a yes-or-no choice — it’s a practice of collectively wiser and inclusive decision-making. Many new and different ways of collaborating are essential and already emerging.
Our enduring mission is to build bridges, disable barriers and prevent blockades because where energy flows, civilisation grows. As the only truly ‘open to all energy interests’ international organisation, we are committed to delivering energy for people and planet, peace and progress together.
5. Convening Power for Common Good – As hard and political powers realign, soft power – connection, collaboration, community – is being squeezed or denied, and yet remains vital to our common future.
We are all part of something bigger – and our community provides a structure of belonging that supports collective intelligence and guides wiser, collaborative action, rather than defending national or sectoral positions and vested interests.
As a community we aim to equip energy leaders everywhere by building a new World Energy Compass together – grounded in principles of resilience, circularity, flourishing – which can used to inform energy planning and better guide futures-fit pathfinding.
Making Change Happen – Hop, Skip, and Jump
From Panama, we now hop toward COP30 in Brazil before skipping across diverse regions and making a big jump together at a groundbreaking World Energy Congress in Riyadh (October 2026).
We are not promoting moonshot technology missions, but we are clarifying blind spots and bright spots.
- Blind-Spots: what do underserved communities, women and youth need from more and better energy futures – and how might energy services differ from what is on offer today to scale bottom up possibilities rather than waiting for trickle down?
- Bright-Spots: what can regional power pools learn from African power pools? What can we all learn about regulation, policy and global energy governance from the new winds and seeds of change, which are now blowing from East to South and South to West?-
Building and sustaining momentum starts with a ‘hop, skip, and jump’ theory of change: connecting the series of smaller steps – hundreds and thousands of them – in different places and at different paces, as we build and transform energy systems together.
Differentiation Through Modernisation
Now is the time to renew and strengthen our edge as the world’s most diverse, inclusive, and globally connected energy community — locally rooted, globally networked, and human at heart.
As an independent, not-for-profit organisation, the World Energy Council continues to modernise and exercise it soft-power credentials in a noisy digital world.
We convert openness and independence into traction, transparency, and trustworthiness though a unique combination of community-wide capabilities:
Collective intelligence. Collaborative competencies. And convening power for common good.
Our analogue edge is a social super grid – connecting all energy interests leaders across geographies, generations, and genders – as carries of inspiration, empathy, and integrity.
Realistic Hope is Always in Action
As we journey toward Belém and Riyadh, I’m reminded of an old story: Two wolves live in the forest — one called Hope, the other Fear. Which one wins? The one we choose to feed.
This is a moment for realistic hope – not wishful thinking or polarised prescriptions – for learning by doing, working with disciplined imagination, and enabling more open and honest sharing of what is working – and whether it can be made to work elsewhere – and what’s not working.
It’s not the end of the world but it may be the end of energy world as we knew. A new story of more and better energy for billions of lives and a healthy planet is already being written – and we are writing it together.
Humanising Energy Leadership – Beyond the Individual
Leadership is not a solo act, its sustained by connection and collaboration, not determined by control. I’m deeply grateful to work with such an inspiring and talented team – and with thousands of energy leaders around the world – as we continue connecting people and planet, peace and prosperity.
The future is not determined by heroes, but cocreated through structures of belonging, by communities that act locally, think systemically, and learn globally.
This is the analogue edge of our amazing community in a digitally noisy world: a living web of collective intelligence and collaborative agency.