There are human years, dog years and light-years. Increasingly, it feels like we also need another unit of time: energy years. On this scale, the pace of change is fast, but the pace of forgetting is often even faster. What only recently counted as a foundation of energy policy returns to public debate after a few seasons as if it were a brand-new discovery.
Energy operates on a scale of decades. Infrastructure operates on a scale of generations. Public memory, however, increasingly follows the rhythm of a single crisis. This tension between the long time of the system and the short time of the debate is not new, but today it has become particularly visible.
A good example is the current discussion about the growing dependence of Poland, and Europe more broadly, on LNG supplies from the United States. The tone of this debate is often surprisingly alarmist, as if the very idea that diversification creates new dependencies were something unexpected. Yet this exact mechanism has been described for years.
Already in the middle of the previous decade, work on the concept of the Energy Union made it clear that security of supply does not mean finding an “ideal” partner. It means building a system capable of functioning in a world of shifting interests. Diversification
does not eliminate dependencies. It changes them. Every major supplier, regardless of geopolitical narrative, seeks stable demand, predictable conditions and flexibility that primarily serves its own interests. Norway, Russia and the United States differ politically, but the logic of interest remains strikingly similar.
After 2022, this picture only became more complex. Africa increasingly offers gas to Europe. Asia absorbs Russian oil and re-exports refined products. The United States strengthens its economic position while stabilising the European LNG market. The Arctic is turning into a space of growing competition for resources, often at the expense of earlier climate ambitions. Under such conditions, new tensions and new dependencies are not exceptions. They are the system’s natural state.
And this was hardly a surprise either. For years it has been written that energy crises would spill over into other spheres: politics, finance, technology and cybersecurity. That it is difficult to predict where the next destabilising impulse will come from, but that one thing is certain: it will come. This was not a catastrophic vision, but a consistent system-level analysis.
That is why today’s surprise that no energy supplier is an ideal partner sounds familiar. Not because something has suddenly changed, but because in energy years memory tends to be shorter than the investment cycle. What once served as the starting point for discussions about security is, after a few years, treated as an inconvenient aside.
It is worth separating two issues here. Current relationships are based on contracts and legal frameworks, and that makes a fundamental difference. Energy does not run on sympathy or personal trust. It runs on contractual provisions, enforcement mechanisms and the predictability of rules. The problem begins only when the law starts to erode and contracts become part of day-to-day political games. Then even the best-designed diversification loses its protective function.
So perhaps the issue is not that someone overlooked something or miscalculated. Energy simply has this characteristic: from time to time, it forces us to rediscover obvious truths. That diversification is not an end state. That dependencies do not disappear, they only change direction. That security is not about choosing a “good” partner, but about the durability of rules.
In energy years, this is perfectly normal. Memory fades faster than infrastructure is built, and surprise appears faster than new capacity. Every now and then, usually during blackouts, we rediscover the laws of physics with mild astonishment, realising once again that electricity does not come from declarations or good intentions.
If anything truly repeats itself in energy, it is not crises, but moments of collective surprise.