The 2010s Were Energy’s Decade of the Great Rewiring
Pathways that defined the industry for decades are undergoing fundamental changes.
Photographer: Kena Betancur/Dominick Reuter/Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
One of the buzzier books in business circles this past decade was Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Seventh Sense. Its principal insight: The mere act of connecting things — from the device you’re reading this on to terrorist groups to whole societies — changes the nature of those things.
This is nothing new for energy, the original global network of the modern age making all the other networks possible. What is new is that pathways that defined energy for decades are undergoing fundamental changes. The past decade’s jumble of frackers, Arab Springers, Muskovites, #GND-ers, teenage sailors and millennial princes are all, in their disparate and sometimes opposing ways, part of the same thing: Energy’s great rewiring.