I am not certain we will succeed, but I am certain that without courage, we will most likely fail. In my field of robotics and control systems, courage looks like commissioning a thoroughly tested system that you cannot fully predict in the real world. You act anyway, because waiting for perfect certainty means never acting at all. The energy transition operates on this exact logic, just on a civilizational scale.

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The reality

People often misdiagnose the energy transition as a simple substitution problem. If it were that easy, falling costs would have solved it by now. In reality, it is a wicked problem where infrastructure, markets, regulations, and human behavior are tied together. The energy system is closer to a living ecosystem: you change one variable, and three others shift in ways nobody modeled. I experienced this firsthand introducing data platforms to heavy-steel shipyards along the coast. Introducing a new data platform doesn’t just change information flow. It changes who holds power, who feels competent, and who feels threatened. The energy transition multiplies this effect by orders of magnitude.

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In his book Energy Transitions, Vaclav Smil points out that previous shifts took generations. Moving from wood to coal required roughly 60 years. We are trying to achieve our shift within a single generation. When I look at the data, we are currently adding clean energy on top of existing fossil energy rather than actually replacing it. Recognizing this reality isn't pessimism. It is the starting point for honest planning.

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Admitting the system is harder to control than we assumed takes courage. I have sat in enough strategy meetings to know what happens when someone finally says, "This is harder than we thought." The instinct is to protect the narrative. But successful projects are the ones where someone was honest early enough for the team to adapt. That requires leaders willing to say uncomfortable things in rooms where comfort is the default currency.

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The transition is ultimately about people. I see this in Norway's offshore sector, where engineers who have spent twenty years drilling the freezing North Sea face genuine uncertainty about whether their skills transfer to wind or hydrogen. Norway is simultaneously a major fossil fuel exporter and an aspiring climate leader, a contradiction I navigate daily. The petroleum sector employs over a hundred thousand people and funds our welfare state. Even so, credible forecasts show demand for our products declining. The question is not whether this decline happens, but whether we build a replacement before it arrives.

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Navigating uncertainty

Columbia's Jason Bordoff warns that the road to net zero will include setbacks. Like most people, I prefer certainty, but certainty isn't coming. I catch myself wanting more data before committing. When the path is unclear, the leader who acts shapes the outcome; the leader who waits gets shaped by it. Climate scientist Kate Marvel puts it best: "We need courage, not hope." Hope can be passive. The optimist assumes it will be fine and does nothing. The pessimist asks "what is the point?" and does nothing. In the end, both end up in the exact same place.

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Courage means acting without a guaranteed outcome. In robotics, "acting under uncertainty" means making decisions using incomplete sensor data and imperfect models. A robot cannot wait for perfect information. This is the exact mental model required for the energy transition. We will never have enough data to feel confident. The question is whether we act anyway, knowing we must course-correct. Waiting is the greater risk. A transition of this scale borders on the impossible. That very difficulty makes it compelling. We must attempt it, because the possibility still exists.

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The Courage for openness

Energy planning often happens behind closed doors. Utilities and oil majors guard long-term scenarios like proprietary assets, which blocks collective learning. These proprietary models merely protect companies from being wrong in public. Surrendering that shield takes profound courage. Exposing the logic means inviting scrutiny and risking failure in plain sight. But the energy transition demands exactly this vulnerability.

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Leading companies will willingly show their work. Peer review makes systems stronger. It is true for code, engineering, and energy strategy alike. In industrial automation, open protocols replaced proprietary systems that created isolated data islands. The energy sector faces the exact same problem: closed models create islands of strategy. Openness is not generosity. It is critical infrastructure.

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Where I might be wrong

You could argue that emphasizing courage distracts from policy, and that with a proper carbon price, companies would simply follow incentives. But someone still has to make the first move, and that requires something beyond calculation. My own projects give me pause here: most digital transformations fail not because of technology, but due to people, resistance to change, and leadership failures. Why would the energy transition, far larger and more politically contested, be any different? It won't be, unless we take the human dimension seriously. Courage is the missing variable in most transition models.

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Courage alone isn't sufficient, but it is necessary and underrated. I write this with skin in the game: my coming choices will either contribute to the transition or slow it down. Analyzing courage from a safe distance would be easier, but the transition doesn't need more observers. It needs participants willing to act before the path is clear. The hardest form of courage is what Roman Krznaric calls "cathedral thinking": investing in infrastructure that won't return value until 2050 or later.

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I don't want to end on a neat cliché, as that would feel false to the uncertainty I have emphasized. We can make good decisions, but we will need to practice courage repeatedly, even when it does not come naturally. In Norway, industries historically learn from each other: shipping learned from fisheries, oil and gas learned from shipping, and now offshore wind and hydrogen can learn from oil and gas.

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We are not starting from scratch. But the willingness to apply past lessons to unproven, uncertain frontiers does not transfer automatically. The technology is ready. The data is as good as it will ever be. All that remains is the willingness to press start before we feel completely safe.

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That willingness is courage. It is not a personality trait. It is a practice.

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Abbas Tariverdi

Technology Lead, Aker Solutions

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