Authors:


Venkat Venkatraman
Arno van den Haak







  • Venkat Venkatraman, David J. McGrath Jr. Professor in Management, Boston University Questrom School of Business
  • Arno van den Haak, Head, WorldWide Business Development, AWS Energy

The global energy sector is facing its biggest challenge in recent history. Although many of today’s energy executives have seen large shifts before—the oil embargo of 1973 and the price crash between 2014 and 2016, for example—the industry today is facing vastly different market conditions driven by simultaneous demand shocks from COVID19 and a glut of energy supply that has driven the cost of energy to lowest levels in history.

While many sectors will be faced with restarting their supply chains once the immediate threats of COVID-19 wane, the energy sector has a much more difficult task: to balance these uncertainties on the supply side with the steadily increasing and changing demands of an ever-growing world population. In this climate, how can energy companies survive in the short term while preparing to produce energy that is sustainable, secure, profitable, and also affordable by global consumers in the longer term?

We propose a simple four-step playbook:
  1. Reflect on this inflection point and make sense of it. Identify what needs to change and what should remain core to the business.
  2. Reimagine different energy futures and calculate the financial, resource, and operational impacts of the different futures.
  3. Restructure the core operations to manage the immediate restart and to be relevant in the future.
  4. Realign external relationships in ecosystems for efficiency and growth.

Please submit information to download a copy of The New Energy Playbook - An Accelerator for Innovation and Transformation.


Download the eBook