Imagining the next 50 years: energy, geopolitics, and the future of AI

To mark a day dedicated to imagining the future, which included the ‘Imagine the Next 50’ summit in Lisbon, global thinkers such as former President of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso, former Google X Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat, and renowned historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari debated the intersection of renewable energy, autonomous AI, and the future of geopolitics and civilisational progress. 

As electrification accelerates, AI advances, and geopolitical tensions reshape priorities, the defining question for governments, businesses and societies is no longer whether change is coming, but how to navigate it.

Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade, EDP’s Chief Executive Officer, examined the future of energy and the imperative for grid resilience; José Manuel Durão Barroso, former President of the European Commission and former Prime Minister of Portugal, addressed a global landscape increasingly defined by strategic competition and political fragmentation; Mo Gawdat, former Google X Chief Business Officer and author of best-selling titles on technology such as ‘Alive - Conversations About Life When Technology Becomes Sentient’, reflected on the disruptive speed and practical interfaces of artificial intelligence; and Yuval Noah Harari, renowned historian, philosopher, and author of ‘Sapiens’ and his most recent work, ‘Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’, challenged the audience to consider the civilisational implications of technology capable of becoming an autonomous actor within human systems.

Together, their contributions pointed towards a common conclusion: the next 50 years will be shaped by the deep intersection of energy, intelligence and resilience.

The history of EDP's first 50 years mirrors the broader transformation of Portugal itself. Created in 1976 through the merger of 13 regional companies, EDP was established with a clear national mission: to electrify the country. It connected villages, hospitals, industries and communities, bringing access to a service that would become fundamental to economic development and social progress. Over time, however, its role expanded far beyond Portugal’s borders.
Today, EDP operates across multiple continents and has evolved from a nationally regulated utility into one of the world's leading renewable energy companies. That continuous capacity for adaptation remains one of the group's defining strengths.

As Miguel Stilwell d'Andrade explained, EDP's transformation from a national utility into a global energy company was made possible by its ability to continually reinvent itself, embracing new technologies and evolving from a fully regulated business into one operating at a global scale. 

Electricity demand is entering a new growth cycle across key global markets. According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) report ‘Electricity Mid-Year Update 2026’, global electricity demand is forecast to grow by 3.6% in 2026 and accelerate further to 3.8% in 2027. Amid this surging demand, renewables are taking the lead in power generation: set to overtake coal-fired output in 2026, renewable generation is projected to grow by over 8% this year, expanding its share in the global electricity mix from 33% in 2025 to 37% by 2027. At the same time, power grid operators like PJM in the United States have quadrupled their growth expectations for the coming decade.

Artificial intelligence is reinforcing this trend, creating a direct, structural link between the digital economy and power generation. Simply put, advanced computing processing relies fundamentally on a constant, reliable supply of power.

To address these structural shifts, EDP is committing €12 billion in investment over the next three years (2026–2028), concentrating capital on networks, renewable generation, and the systemic flexibility required to support rapidly electrifying economies.
 

Looking ahead, the energy system of tomorrow relies not only on additional generation capacity; it fundamentally depends on the ability to manage increasingly complex interactions between supply and demand. As Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade emphasised during his keynote, building long-term resilience requires integrating networks, batteries, pumped-storage hydro and demand-side management, which are essential to guarantee grid resilience as renewable generation expands.

While long-term debates around alternative energy technologies continue, the immediate growth in demand requires deployable, proven solutions. Nuclear development, while relevant in long-term discussions, cannot address the urgent demand pressures of the next five to ten years. The immediate transition must be driven by gas, wind, solar, and storage - technologies ready for immediate, large-scale deployment.

Ultimately, transforming energy infrastructure is a human endeavor. EDP’s ability to navigate technological and market changes over the past five decades has rested squarely on the talent, resilience, and collective culture of its people.

If energy is entering a new expansion cycle, it is doing so against the backdrop of an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment. The international environment is increasingly defined by great-power competition, technological disruption, demographic changes, climate pressures, the lasting operational lessons of recent global crises and the lingering effects of the pandemic. The result is an international environment that is increasingly difficult to predict and navigate. 

These developments reshape how global organisations assess risk, capital allocation, and supply chains. Resilience has shifted from an operational consideration to a board-level strategic priority. 

Despite Europe's world-class scientific capabilities, industrial strength and engineering expertise, Durão Barroso argued that its greatest competitive challenge lies in execution rather than innovation. In his view, Europe must accelerate its ability to turn ambition into implementation, acting with the speed and scale needed to remain globally competitive. 

To build genuine strategic resilience and maintain economic competitiveness, Europe must focus on structural execution: deepening capital markets, integrating regional energy systems, building industrial scale, and cultivating a proactive growth mindset. Robust economic growth is not optional; it is the essential precondition for sustaining Europe's high standards of living and social protections.

Durão Barroso also warned that preserving Europe's social model will require sustained economic growth and structural reforms, arguing that prosperity remains the foundation for maintaining its systems of social protection. 

The former President of the European Commission also challenged the notion that resilience can be achieved through regulation alone. In his view, Europe must combine reform at a national level with greater integration at a European level if it hopes to compete effectively in a world increasingly shaped by continental-scale players.

Crucially, overcoming these structural bottlenecks requires moving away from bureaucratic inertia and exercising decisive political and corporate leadership - a vision built on both energy and institutional maturity.

Reflecting on how organisations navigate such monumental shifts, Durão Barroso pointed to EDP’s own half-century journey as an example of balancing drive with experience.

Looking at EDP's 50-year journey, Durão Barroso said the company has reached a stage where energy is matched by wisdom, a combination he believes is more necessary than ever in today's increasingly complex world.

For Durão Barroso, combining that drive with long-term wisdom is precisely what governments, institutions, and businesses need to navigate the decades ahead.

Despite the prominence of artificial intelligence in global business conversations, Mo Gawdat argued that real-world adoption remains far lower than many assume. While AI technology is already capable of transforming the way people and organisations work, he believes the main barrier is not the technology itself, but the user interfaces through which people interact with it. As these interfaces become more intuitive over the coming months, he expects AI adoption across individuals and enterprises to accelerate dramatically. 

While much of the AI debate focuses on the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Mo Gawdat argued that today's systems already surpass average human intelligence across a wide range of specialised data processing, analytical and communication tasks. In his view, the real transformation is not a future milestone but one that is already underway.

The scale of this transformation is difficult to overstate. Average human speaks around 16,000 words a day, modern specialised microchip processors can handle over 15,000 tokens per second. The implication is clear: businesses and institutions are entering a world in which intelligence is becoming dramatically cheaper, faster and more accessible than ever before.
 

For organisations, this transformation changes the nature of strategy itself. Traditional planning models assume a relatively stable environment in which leaders can analyse, plan and execute over long periods. Long-term, static planning models, akin to traditional chess moves, are giving way to fluid, highly responsive decision-making. 

In that environment, competitiveness depends less on producing perfect plans and more on maintaining agility, testing rapidly and adapting continuously in response to change.

The author compared artificial intelligence to a new utility infrastructure: just as electricity became universally accessible through the power grid, AI is making intelligence available on demand, fundamentally changing how people and organisations access knowledge and solve problems.

The rise of open-source artificial intelligence enables regions and industries worldwide to build customized, secure, and culturally aligned technology platforms locally, driving native innovation and digital autonomy.

In a comprehensive fireside discussion moderated by Tom Parker, host of ‘The Next Five’ podcast (a Financial Times Partner Content production), historian Yuval Noah Harari framed the current convergence of technology, energy, and information networks as a major turning point for human civilisation. 

Harari described human language as the operating system of civilisation. By enabling people to create and share collective narratives, it has made large-scale cooperation possible and laid the foundations for institutions such as governments, religions, financial systems and trade networks.

Harari argued that artificial intelligence represents an unprecedented technological shift. Unlike the printing press, radio or television, which remained tools under human control, AI can act as an autonomous agent, making decisions and creating entirely new ideas, legal fictions and cultural narratives without direct human authorship. 

This distinction has profound implications for economic, political and social systems that were originally designed around human decision-makers.

Harari argued that one of the areas most exposed to disruption is democracy itself. Modern democratic systems rely inherently on open conversation. As algorithmic processes increasingly curate public information streams, democratic discourse adapts to new digital mechanics.

At the same time, the centralisation of digital processing and code creates unprecedented concentrations of informational power, elevating software autonomy and digital sovereignty into key strategic topics.

Another concern highlighted by Harari is that AI may create systems too complex for people to understand. Modern societies already rely on financial, legal and administrative systems that few citizens fully comprehend. AI could dramatically accelerate that trend: “It will create much more complicated systems of control that most humans will have almost zero chance of understanding.”

For Harari, the risk is not necessarily that such systems stop functioning, but that they gradually move beyond meaningful human oversight.

The challenges of the coming decades extend far beyond generating more energy or processing higher volumes of data. The true test lies in deploying these vast technological and energy capabilities with clarity, purpose, and wisdom. 

Across the different perspectives shared throughout the event, one idea remained constant: the choices being made today will help shape how energy systems, economies and societies evolve over the coming decades.

50 years ago, EDP was founded on a simple, powerful promise: to bring light and power to millions, driving societal progress. Today, as we stand at the intersection of renewable power, unprecedented technological potential, and an unpredictable, rapidly changing geopolitical environment, that core ambition remains unchanged. 

We gathered to reflect on these shifting global dynamics so that we can make informed, bold, and timely decisions today. The next 50 years will not be written by technology alone, but by the vision, courage, and human leadership we choose to bring to it. And We Choose Earth.