People, not technology, are energy security’s weak spot, ABB’s Holsten tells ADIPEC

Per Erik Holsten, President of the Energy Industries division at ABB, said the single biggest vulnerability in energy systems is human rather than technical, as he spoke at the ADIPEC 2026 Boardroom Roundtable on energy security and resilience in Abu Dhabi.

“Hey, I'm an optimist,” Holsten said when moderator Dr. Carole Nakhle, Founder and CEO of Crystol Energy, asked each panellist to name the single biggest weakness. “So I think the vulnerability we have is more on the human side of the collaboration.”

He said technology companies, investors, politicians and policy makers need to talk to one another, and that the education system has to move alongside project delivery. The problem is not the technology, the investors or the mix of energy sources, he said: “we can make all that work”.

The people theme ran through the nuclear discussion. Tommy Kassem, EVP at Celeros Flow Technology, said his company is seeing “a renaissance in nuclear”, with small modular reactors a particular focus.

Kassem said the constraint will not be hardware. “The big bottleneck in this is not going to be the fact that it can be produced or constructed or material. It's actually going to be the human capital,” he said.

He said nuclear, and oil and gas, had been pushed aside for years, citing Fukushima and CO2. “We need to go back and educate people,” he said, on where electricity comes from and how safe it is.

He also warned of a squeeze on materials. “The manufacturers of turbines need steel, the manufacturers of pump need steel, the manufacturers of wind need steel, so we’re all pulling on the same source,” Kassem said.

Holsten, whose company has a memorandum of understanding to provide technology to Rolls-Royce, said an SMR can range from 15 megawatts to probably 450 or 500 megawatts, so roughly three of the largest would match a conventional nuclear plant. On cost, he said “the repeatability of this is the key answer to the affordability question”, and that the economics should work in the long term once the pilot phases are through.

Jeremy Crane, Group CEO and Founder of Yellow Door Energy, challenged a point made from the panel that storage has not yet reached the breakthrough needed to cover hours when the sun is not shining.

“I disagree with you a little bit there,” Crane said. “I think we have customers right now, some that are represented at this event, who are going to rely on solar storage solutions this year for 24-7 power.”

Crane acknowledged that backups and gas generators sit alongside such systems. “But it is economically the best solution, and it hits all the other criteria as well,” he said.

Anna Spektor, Head of Oil & Gas Middle East at Linde, said she sees no conflict between supporting natural gas today and investing in new technologies and energy sources for the future. “So it’s a balance,” she said.

Spektor also pointed to what she called stranded demand: customers who want energy but cannot get it because the links are not connected. She cited air conditioning, with US household penetration of about 90 per cent while some regions sit well below 20 per cent.

Hussein Shoukry, President for Siemens Energy Middle East & Africa, had opened the panellists’ remarks by arguing that energy security is back on the agenda after years of neglect. “It’s very important to have a diverse energy mix,” he said. “It’s going to be impossible to rely on only one or two sources of energy.”

Asked for the single biggest vulnerability, Shoukry named three. The first was the physical exposure of infrastructure, and he called for building energy infrastructure underground, pointing to what Ukraine has been asking for. He also cited localisation, saying the crisis had made the region “very aware of the importance of localization”.

Shoukry said Siemens Energy works to keep capacity close by, “whether it's human or also equipment”, to overcome supply chain challenges. His third point was cross-border cooperation. “You cannot localize and duplicate everything in a single country,” he said.

Hector Perea, Director of Energy Infrastructure Investments at XRG, said the scale of expansion required is “massive”, and that data centres in the US alone will by 2030 consume about twice what the UK consumes as a whole. For investors, he said, the question is when the right time to invest is.

“The human factor of things is what prevents us from moving forward in a faster way,” Holsten said.