Can the energy system withstand a more dangerous world?

Climate Week in New York was supposed to be about climate. Instead, the conversation kept being pulled back to energy security, resilience and the growing sense that the world has entered a more volatile era. Conflict in the Middle East, drone attacks on critical infrastructure, the weaponisation of energy supply, and the surge in power demand from AI are all forcing policymakers, companies and investors to ask a harder question: how do you build an energy system that can absorb shocks without pushing costs even higher for consumers?

In this special live edition of Energy Gang, recorded at NYU, host Ed Crooks is joined by regular contributor Amy Myers Jaffe and three guests with very different vantage points on that question: Neil Brown, managing director at KKR; Anna Shpitsberg, Wood Mackenzie’s head of global power and renewables research; and Sarah Kapnick, global head of climate advisory at JPMorgan. Together they explore how geopolitics, technology and climate risk are colliding to reshape the energy agenda.

Neil argues that the attacks on Gulf infrastructure mark a strategic break with the past: energy systems are no longer exposed only to familiar market risks, but to cheaper, more agile forms of disruption that can inflict outsized damage. He makes the case that the Gulf states have shown real resilience through defence spending, sovereign capital and economic diversification, but warns that the deeper problem is political. In his view, the prospect of a durable settlement in the region looks remote, raising the risk that energy markets are entering a prolonged era of instability rather than a temporary shock.

Sarah and Anna widen the lens. Sarah argues that resilience now means more than access to fuel: it means the ability to keep supplying energy through geopolitical, technological and climate volatility. Anna points to Ukraine’s experience to show why distributed systems can recover faster than large centralised assets, while also stressing that resilience is not the same as self-sufficiency. Building a more secure system may require domestic capacity, strategic partnerships, industrial policy and a willingness to pay for optionality at a time when affordability pressures are already intense.

That tension runs through the whole discussion. AI and data-centre growth are lifting electricity demand, but no one is certain how fast that demand will materialise, how efficient future computing will become, or where investment should land first. The result is a more complex energy system with fewer easy answers: decentralisation can reduce single points of failure but create new cyber risks; trade policy can support domestic manufacturing but raise prices; and climate policy becomes much harder to sustain when voters no longer feel they can afford the transition. The stakes, the panel argues, are no longer just about decarbonisation in the abstract, but about whether energy systems can stay secure, investable and politically durable in a more dangerous world.