Prof. Dr. Philipp Staudt gave the opening keynote at the AWS Energy Symposium on 25 June 2026 at the AWS office in Munich. The symposium brought together executives and technologists from across the energy sector under the theme "Powering What's Next: Resilience Meets Intelligence".

His central argument: the energy transition is reshaping the architecture of energy systems, moving from centralized generation towards millions of distributed actors that have to be coordinated, balanced and integrated in real time. That coordination challenge is at its core a digital one. The infrastructures being built to meet it, however, are not neutral pipes. They are platforms, and they carry the economic dynamics that platforms bring with them.
Platform economics offers a framework for understanding who controls access to these systems, why suboptimal standards persist and prove nearly impossible to displace once established, and how network effects create path dependencies that neither market forces nor regulation easily undo.

The German energy sector illustrates the breadth of the phenomenon. Alongside commercial platforms for managing and marketing flexibility, platform structures also underpin market communication and the smart meter infrastructure. Each of these raises questions about access, standard setting and long-term lock in, and these questions bear directly on decisions being taken today. Several of them were taken up in the discussion following the keynote.

Our thanks go to all participants and to Kevin Ansorg for organizing the event and extending the invitation.