 Energy is truly the lifeblood of our economies, a critical infrastructure that affects all of our lives and virtually every activity. Throughout history, one thing that has remained common for all economies is that economic development needs energy. How we access, transfer, and transform this energy into the useful work of heating, lighting, and motion forms what we call an energy system. A set of interrelated elements from the capturing of natural resources to processing and refining to transportation and distribution to consumption. But energy is not simply about technology, it is multidimensional. Involving natural resources, technology processes, economic and social institutions, all of these variables interact to give us the outcome of the energy system. Energy systems are a central enabling and limiting factor to the development of an economy. As such, throughout history, the level of technological, social, and economic complexity of societies has been directly related to its form of energy system. Traditional energy systems that were limited to the energy conversion of human and animal muscle only ever enabled pre-modern economies to reach a certain degree of complexity, but this changed fundamentally with the Industrial Revolution, as the advent of the combustion engine enabled economies to access and harness the explosive power of fossil fuels. For the past 200 years, the fundamental changes in demographics, economy, and society has been directly supported by the development of an industrial age energy architecture, whose foundations were laid in the 19th century by harnessing coal and steam power, and which reached its climax in the 20th century in the so-called age of oil. We can characterize these industrial age energy systems as being based on the elite energy sources of fossil fuels that have a very high concentration of energy, requiring significant processing and economics of scale, making it a very capital intensive industry and deeply integrated into capital markets. These industrial energy systems were developed in parallel with the apparatus of the modern nation state. They are highly centralized and regulated, often forming part of government monopolies or oligopolies, with deep social and economic vested interest, and significant sunk capital costs. It is these industrial age energy systems that dominate the energy architecture of our global economy today, with fossil fuels forming over 80% of the energy mix. But many factors point to the conclusion that we live in a time of profound change in our energy systems architecture, as a number of major factors have converged to drive fundamental change within how we produce and consume energy. Here we could cite how the negative environmental externalities of fossil fuel combustion have been increasingly apparent and particularly acute with respect to climate change. The idea of peak oil and growing demand from emerging markets is raising questions about whether there will be sufficient energy at a feasible cost going forward. Energy security has become another key issue. As emerging markets demand more energy in politically unstable regions of the world, it creates greater potential for conflicting interests. And lastly, distributed technologies like solar and wind, coupled with electric vehicles, are starting to scale and have an impact on the industry. When we combine these with information technology, we are starting to see a whole new paradigm in our energy architecture. With the rise of clean technologies, the energy industry is clearly in a state of transition towards the outcomes that society desires. But in reality, it is not happening fast enough. The data from energy industry analysis on the one hand and scientific facts about emissions on the other simply do not add up to the stated aims of society and policymakers for a cleaner, stable environment. Conventional industry analysts predict that fossil fuels will still dominate the energy mix in 2040, making up somewhere between 50 and 80% of primary energy consumption on the global level. Because of the rapid growth in demand from developing economies, renewable technologies at present are only really offsetting this increase in consumption. We are still using the same amount of fossil fuel, and this is set to continue, unless there is significant industry disruption of some form. In the meantime, our economy, society, and environment pay a very high price for this situation. In fact, the IMF estimates this cost to be approximately $5.3 trillion a year, equal to 6.5% of global GDP, which is the cost generated by the negative externalities of fossil fuel consumption on human health and environment. Plus direct subsidies paid to the industry by governments. Achieving the transformation and outcomes we desire from our energy system will engender a major systemic transformation in the coming decades, as it is reshaped along many dimensions. But before anything, we need an integrated approach to energy. We need to appreciate that how energy is produced and consumed is part of a system. And when we go out to the global level, this is a very complex system. Solving one part of the equation will not solve the energy nexus. Technology is important, but breakthroughs and renewable technology are not going to solve the problem. Equally, breakthroughs in political regulation are not going to either. As important as these are, they are simply components within a larger system. We will not get radical breakthroughs within the whole complex energy industry by optimizing individual components. If we really want a paradigm shift in energy, we need to think and act on the system's level, not on the component level. Altering the properties of the components will give us linear incremental improvements in the whole system. But altering how those components interact can give us the kind of non-linear evolutionary transformations that are desired. Put simply, we are dealing with a systemic problem within a complex system. In such a case, there are never simple solutions. The most important thing is to give up the idea that there is one simple solution and begin to focus our attention on the system's overall integration. As our energy architecture becomes more complex, we also need integration and convergence. We already see this happening at the forefront of innovation in the form of the smart grid that represents a new paradigm in energy systems. Information technology coupled with renewables is reshaping the energy industry. Diverse energy sources are converging onto the grid, creating a distributed non-linear platform that is both dynamic and adaptive through the use of information technology. In order to maintain relevance within this new context of the smart grid, incumbent energy companies will need to shift from being centralized providers of commodity energy towards a platform model where they work to manage distributed energy networks, providing the information and services for end users to manage their energy provision and demand. The leading energy companies of tomorrow will not be producers, they will be platform orchestrators. Our next generation energy architecture will be a very complex system. Renewable energies are distributed, but they are present in only small amounts. The central challenge is in creating critical mass by collaborating across large networks of micro producers to match energy demand with supply, and load balance these intermittent energy sources. When we couple this with the rise of the internet of things, as the electrical grid converges with millions of smart devices, we get a very complex system where the central challenge is no longer mass production, but instead an organization, the development, and maintenance of platforms for organizing these distributed energy systems. Incumbent energy providers that remain in their traditional role as simply providers are already being disintermediated by distributed startups. Within this context, the required core competency of energy companies will be in primarily dealing with this vast complexity of the energy internet. The government regulations and huge capital costs that were previously a barrier to entry will no longer protect traditional companies. Disruptions will come from within the industry and new startups. But more importantly, it will come from IT companies that have the capabilities to build and manage these information systems that will lie on top of and manage every unit of energy all the way from generation to consumption. The energy internet is at the heart of achieving the radical breakthroughs in overall efficiency that we need within our energy economy if we wish to realize some form of environmental sustainability in the coming decades. As it is not a single technology or solution, but offers us the opportunity to actually restructure the entire system. It helps to shift our focus away from the gross input of energy resources to focusing more on the actual intelligent usage of those resources. Because of the linear nature to the industrial age model, we focused way too much attention on the gross input of resources and too little on the intelligent usage of those resources. Through non-linear circular processes within the system. Changing the energy mix that is inputted to the system is important, but it will only get us a small part of the way. Actually reorganizing how we use and distribute those resources through the intelligent design of the system's internal organization, through how the elements are interrelated to create synergies. It is there where vast potential for a radical disruptive transformation really lies. You can directly download our white paper that explores these topics and provides deeper analysis to present dimensions of change within our global energy system.