On 17 June 1914, as he wrote in his biography Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, at that time Minister of the British Navy, asked Parliament to buy 51% of the oil producer company Anglo-Persian Oil company by the state, whose acquisition had been trading for months.
Parliament approved the operation with 254 votes and 18 votes against, and was terminated at a price of £2 million. Thanks to this, the Royal Navy managed to secure all the necessary oil for its warships without relying on any private company or any foreign government. In the following 50 years, only the interests of that 51% acquired by Churchill over the oil profits of the company covered all the costs of the ships built after 1914. Anglo Persian Oil Company is now known as British Petroleum (BP).
Churchill's vision allowed us to understand the importance of oil in the years that came, both in the operational part and in the growth of heavy industry and employment, and also in the financial aspect.
There are sectors at certain historical moments that need the cooperation of all actors so that the ecosystem can grow and sustain itself in a more robust and efficient way. This includes the public sector as well as the private sector.
Growing as an ecosystem today is central to energy transition and digital transformation. For the energy transition today, the challenge remains to reduce the costs of generating renewable energy, and is accelerating, especially in Europe and Australia, the hydrogen revolution.
The management of the new power plants and their smart networks need on-site iot sensors and their data is in the cloud allocated in a state-of-the-art datacenter. In order for clouds to be efficient, quality connectivity is required, and this is a classic example of how ecosystem growth is needed to succeed contemporary strategic sectors.
Today is the time for global efforts to be made in this direction, so that it can grow the ecosystem of these strategic sectors and so that people become empowered for the new work demand of these sectors. Always taking into account what Voltaire wrote in 1759: work has at a distance three major problems: boredom, vices and needs.
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