Energy—and the energy transition—has become mission-critical to the wider sustainability agenda. That was the gist of my penultimate Rewilding Markets post of 2025. In effect, climate stability, nature recovery, industrial strategy, social equity, even geopolitical resilience all now hinge on how effectively societies generate, move, store, and use energy.
This is why energy literacy is fast becoming essential. It’s no longer enough to know where power comes from. Leaders increasingly need to understand system dynamics, including electrification, grids and storage, AI-enabled optimisation, hydrogen and resilience—plus the trade-offs between security, affordability, and decarbonisation.
The World Future Energy Summit
In this post, I explore how the UAE is positioning itself in this rapidly evolving landscape—and why the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) offers a useful lens on what comes next.
The 2026 edition of WFES, taking place from 13-15 January, will feature more than 800 global brands, a Greenhouse start-up zone, the Fuse AI cleantech pavilion and the Green Hydrogen Innovation Hub. Over three days, there will be conferences led by over 300 industry experts, with nine exhibition halls showcasing breakthrough solutions and opportunities to connect with more than 50,000 energy and sustainability professionals.
As it happens, my own wake-up moment to the scale of the UAE’s ambition came during COP28, when I spoke in Abu Dhabi at a First Abu Dhabi Bank event. That experience formed part of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, now one of the more interesting global platforms for tackling sustainability at scale by bringing together governments, business, finance, and technology.
The UAE has moved decisively into large-scale renewables, particularly solar, leveraging world-class solar irradiation and access to low-cost capital. Flagship projects include the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park—one of the world’s largest—and a series of utility-scale solar developments delivered at record-low global tariffs.
Through its Masdar project, the UAE has also rapidly expanded its international footprint across solar, wind, storage, and hybrid systems, with projects now spanning more than 40 countries and over 50 GW of capacity.
A flying visit to Masdar City in 2023 reinforced the point. Not a flawless experiment by any means—few pioneering initiatives ever are—but a powerful signal of intent: an evolving cluster of future-focused ventures designed with the long term in mind.
All of this helps explain why the World Future Energy Summit, the flagship event of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, has evolved into one of the most consequential gatherings in the global energy calendar. Less about rhetoric, more about delivery—at a time when that distinction really matters.
From commodity to technology
One of the most important shifts underway in the energy world is the move from energy as a commodity to energy as a technology.
As Azeem Azhar and others have argued, energy as a technology behaves very differently. Costs fall along learning curves rather than fuel cycles. Innovation compounds. Software, data, and AI become as important as steel and concrete. And value increasingly shifts from extraction to intelligence.
Seen this way, energy:
· improves through iteration and scale,
· converges with digital infrastructure and AI,
· becomes modular, decentralised, and participatory, and
· reshapes geopolitics around capability rather than scarcity.
Crucially, the UAE is not treating clean energy as a narrow technology swap. It is investing in entire energy systems—including grid modernisation, battery storage, demand-side management, and AI-enabled optimisation—to ensure reliability as renewables scale.
Hydrogen also plays a central role, acting as a bridge between clean power and hard-to-abate sectors. The UAE is advancing green hydrogen, blue hydrogen paired with carbon capture, and export-oriented derivatives such as ammonia—positioning itself as a future supplier not just of clean electrons, but of clean molecules.
At the same time, there is a clear-eyed recognition that fossil fuels will not disappear overnight. Hence significant investment in carbon management: CCUS integrated into industrial facilities, methane reduction, and operational efficiency improvements. The logic is pragmatic—cut emissions first where it is cheapest and fastest, while scaling clean alternatives for the longer term.
This framing has become increasingly visible at the World Future Energy Summit. Over recent editions, the conversation has shifted decisively—from megawatts to systems; from isolated projects to integrated platforms; from decarbonisation as burden to decarbonisation as opportunity.
A focal point of this evolution is the Innovation Intelligence Hub: a 3,600-square-metre space built around a simple insight—that the next phase of transformation will be driven not by standalone technologies, but by integrated, intelligent, and secure energy systems. Here, start-ups meet capital and infrastructure, AI meets grids and demand, and the conversation moves from “what’s possible” to “what’s investable, scalable, and deployable now.”
The energy literacy gap
Meanwhile, if energy is becoming the central nervous system of modern economies, then energy literacy is no longer optional—it is a core leadership and governance capability.
For much of the 20th century, energy could be treated as background infrastructure: abundant, centralised, and largely invisible to non-experts. That world has ended. Today, energy decisions shape competitiveness, national security, climate stability, household affordability, and social consent.
For me, the UAE offers a revealing case study in what energy-literate governance looks like in practice. Starting from deep fossil-fuel strength, the country has avoided an abrupt “either/or” shift away from hydrocarbons. Instead, it has adopted a both/and strategy: monetising oil and gas efficiently in the near term, while reinvesting capital, institutions, and talent into clean energy systems at scale.
That transition is visible in:
· utility-scale renewables delivered at record-low costs;
· grid modernisation, storage, and AI-enabled optimisation;
· early investment in hydrogen and clean molecules for hard-to-abate sectors; and
· carbon management, including CCUS and methane reduction, to cut today’s emissions while scaling tomorrow’s alternatives.
Institutions matter. Masdar has grown into a global clean-energy champion, while platforms such as the World Future Energy Summit within Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week connect policy, finance, and technology around deployment rather than rhetoric.
What distinguishes the UAE’s approach is that it:
· accepts the reality of hydrocarbons rather than pretending them away;
· uses fossil-fuel rents to fund clean-energy leadership;
· focuses on scale, speed, and systems, not boutique solutions; and
· positions clean energy as an economic and geopolitical strategy, not just an environmental one.
In short, the UAE is not merely transitioning away from fossil fuels. It is transitioning toward a role as a global energy-systems power—capable of delivering clean electrons, clean molecules, and the intelligence that binds them together.
This is what energy-literate governance looks like: systems thinking instead of siloed policies; long-term investment signals instead of short-term fixes; and visible benefits—cleaner air, cheaper power, greater resilience—that help maintain public consent. And, in the decades ahead, energy literacy may prove to be one of the most underrated—and decisive—leadership skills of all, and not just for sustainability pioneers.
John Elkington is Founder & Global Ambassador at Volans and Chairman & Chief Pollinator at Countercurrent. His personal website can be accessed here.
His latest book, Tickling Sharks, is available on Amazon and through good bookshops.
