Ukraine, Hormuz and the New Meaning of European Energy Security

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Wars are terrible ways to discover that an economic system contains a design flaw. Europe has been forced to learn two versions of the same energy lesson in four years. Ukraine exposed the danger of depending on the wrong supplier. The conflict around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz exposes the vulnerability that remains even after better suppliers are found.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated how dependence on a hostile state for essential energy could become a strategic liability almost overnight. Europe responded by cutting Russian imports, buying gas elsewhere, building LNG infrastructure and accelerating investment in renewables, grids, efficiency and electrification. Hormuz presents a different problem. Much of the oil and gas passing through the strait comes from states that have no intention of using energy as a weapon against Europe, yet a regional conflict can still interrupt supply and drive up prices thousands of kilometres away. The vulnerability lies not only with the supplier, but with an economic system that requires enormous quantities of fuel to keep arriving every day.

That changes the strategic argument for the energy transition. A wind farm, nuclear reactor or solar installation is not merely a low-carbon source of electricity; it is infrastructure that reduces the amount of energy that must cross a border tomorrow. Electrification similarly allows cars, buildings and industrial processes to draw energy from a much wider range of sources instead of remaining tied to a particular fuel. The transition remains a climate project, but it is increasingly also a project of strategic resilience.

Ukraine Turned Decarbonisation into Security Policy

Russia did not create Europe’s renewable-energy transition. The European Union had already committed itself to substantial decarbonisation through the European Green Deal and Fit for 55. In July 2021, seven months before the invasion, the European Commission proposed raising the EU’s 2030 renewable-energy target from 32% to 40%. Less than a year later, following Russia’s invasion, it proposed raising the target again to 45%, explicitly linking the change to faster independence from Russian fossil fuels. The eventual revised Renewable Energy Directive established a binding minimum of 42.5% while retaining 45% as the ambition. Europe was already travelling in the same direction, but the geopolitical value of getting there faster had suddenly increased.

REPowerEU made that connection explicit by combining diversification of fossil-fuel supplies with renewable generation, efficiency, heat pumps, grids and industrial substitution. Since 2021, the EU has installed around 260 GW of renewable capacity, including approximately 204 GW of solar and 57 GW of wind. Wind and solar now provide about 31% of EU electricity and have overtaken fossil-fuel generation, according to the Commission’s four-year review of REPowerEU.

Investment moved in the same direction. The International Energy Agency estimates that clean-energy investment in the EU reached almost $390 billion in 2025. Its analysis of European energy investment attributes the increase in low-emission electricity spending not to a single cause but to the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion, supportive policy and declining technology costs. Ukraine accelerated an existing transition; it did not create it.

The decline in Russian energy dependence is less ambiguous. Russia supplied around 45% of EU gas imports before the crisis; by 2025 its share had fallen to about 12%. Russian crude oil fell from roughly 27% of imports to 2%, while Russian coal imports were eliminated. EU gas consumption also fell sharply, although not every cubic metre represents a permanent strategic gain. Mild weather, behavioural changes and lower industrial production contributed alongside renewables, efficiency and heat pumps. An IEA analysis of the 2022 decline estimated that production curtailments in energy-intensive industries alone reduced gas consumption by around 13 billion cubic metres.

That is a useful warning against treating every fall in fossil-fuel consumption as evidence of greater resilience. If a fertiliser or chemical plant closes because gas has become too expensive and Europe imports the resulting product instead, domestic gas consumption falls without necessarily making the economy more secure. Part of the energy dependence has simply moved inside an imported manufactured good.

Even with that caveat, the broader investment pattern is difficult to dismiss. The IEA estimates that around 70% of the increase in global clean-energy spending between 2020 and 2025 came from countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. Its 2025 investment review specifically points to Europe’s post-invasion push and China’s effort to reduce reliance on imported oil and gas. Climate policy is no longer doing all the work.

Europe Replaced Russia Before It Replaced Fossil Fuels

The neat version of this story falls apart at Europe’s LNG terminals. When Russian pipeline gas disappeared, Europe did not replace every cubic metre with wind turbines and heat pumps. It bought enormous quantities of gas elsewhere. Norway became more important, LNG imports from the United States increased sharply, Qatar remained a significant supplier, and Azerbaijan and North Africa gained strategic importance. Europe also expanded LNG terminals and gas-storage capacity at remarkable speed.

That response worked. The widespread shortages feared in 2022 did not materialise, households remained heated and much of European industry kept operating. Diversifying suppliers was an entirely rational response to an immediate emergency, but it solved two problems differently. Renewables, efficiency and electrification reduced both dependence on Russia and dependence on imported fossil fuels. LNG diversification primarily reduced dependence on Russia.

The difference remains important even if climate policy is left aside. Buying gas from Norway is geopolitically different from buying it from Russia. Replacing Russian gas with Qatari or Azerbaijani supplies produces a more complicated result: Europe gains diversification and reduces the leverage of an adversary, but it has not freed itself from dependence on governments whose political systems may differ considerably from its own. More fundamentally, even the friendliest supplier cannot guarantee the security of the route between producer and consumer. Europe had largely answered the question raised in 2022—where else can we buy the fuel?—without eliminating the need for the fuel to keep arriving.

Hormuz Exposes the Remaining Vulnerability

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow passage through which a substantial share of internationally traded oil and LNG normally moves. The 2026 Middle East conflict has demonstrated how quickly that geography can become an economic problem for countries nowhere near the fighting. The European Commission estimates that 57% of the energy consumed in the EU still comes from imported fossil fuels. Europe spent around €340 billion on fossil-fuel imports in 2025, and according to its AccelerateEU programme, higher prices following the Middle East crisis had added another €62 billion to that bill by the end of July 2026. Europe did not receive €62 billion more energy for the money; it paid more for substantially the same commodity because the geopolitical risk attached to obtaining it had changed.

The traditional response is further diversification: more suppliers, alternative pipelines, additional LNG capacity, larger strategic reserves and protected trade routes. All remain useful, and the investment response shows that energy security does not automatically mean abandoning fossil fuels. The IEA expects natural-gas investment to reach around $330 billion in 2026, its highest level in a decade, supported partly by new LNG export projects in the United States and Qatar. Its 2026 investment assessment explicitly describes the Middle East shock as changing perceptions of risk and encouraging both new supply routes and greater reliance on domestically available energy.

Diversification reduces vulnerability but cannot remove it. A barrel of oil must be extracted, transported, refined and continually replaced by another barrel. LNG must be produced, liquefied, shipped, regasified and fed into a network. Interrupt a sufficiently important part of that chain and prices react far beyond the countries directly involved in the conflict. Ukraine exposed the danger of supplier concentration; Hormuz reveals the broader vulnerability inherent in continuous fuel imports.

Why Electrification Changes the Strategic Equation

Consider two European cars parked next to each other. One runs on petrol. As long as it remains a petrol car, its possible energy sources are tightly constrained: it needs petroleum extracted somewhere, transported to a refinery, processed and continuously distributed through filling stations. The second car is electric. It may still be affected indirectly by an oil or gas shock if fossil-fuel prices influence electricity prices, but its energy source is no longer petroleum. Its battery can ultimately be charged by French nuclear power, Scandinavian hydropower, North Sea wind, Spanish solar, a domestic gas turbine, batteries or electricity imported from a neighbouring country. Electrification increases the number of substitutes available when something goes wrong.

Fossil-dependent system	Electrified alternative	Strategic effect
Petrol or diesel car	Electric vehicle	Can use electricity produced from many primary energy sources
Gas boiler	Heat pump	Reduces direct dependence on continuing gas deliveries
Gas-based industrial heat	Electrified process	Allows energy supply to shift with the electricity mix
Fossil power generation	Renewables, nuclear and storage	Reduces recurring fuel imports for electricity production

This does not make electricity immune to crises. Grid failures, drought, low-wind periods, nuclear outages and cyberattacks create vulnerabilities of their own. A highly electrified economy needs stronger transmission networks, more interconnection, flexible demand, storage and sufficient dispatchable generation. As argued previously, an energy system has to be designed as a system; replacing one form of dependence with a badly balanced electricity system would merely create new points of failure.

The strategic advantage lies in substitutability rather than independence. A petrol shortage cannot be solved by suddenly producing more wind power, while an electrified transport system can make use of that wind power without replacing the vehicles themselves. The same logic makes grids strategically important. A continent may possess abundant renewable and nuclear generation, but without enough transmission it cannot move electricity from where it is available to where it is needed.

Dependence Does Not Disappear—It Changes Form

China presents the obvious challenge to any claim that the energy transition creates strategic autonomy. Replacing imported Russian gas with solar panels manufactured largely in China does not eliminate foreign dependence. The IEA’s Energy Technology Perspectives 2026 estimates that China accounts for roughly 85% of global solar supply-chain production capacity and around 80% of lithium-ion battery production capacity, with its share above 95% in some individual manufacturing stages. Critical minerals and their processing are similarly concentrated.

An energy transition that merely exchanged excessive dependence on Russian gas for excessive dependence on Chinese batteries, solar components, rare-earth processing or grid equipment would reproduce part of the original problem in another industry. Europe has good reason to diversify those supply chains as well. The two forms of dependence are nevertheless different in an important respect.

Fossil-fuel systems are dominated by flow dependency. Their fuel is consumed and must constantly be replaced. Clean-energy systems are more heavily exposed to capital and supply-chain dependency: much of the foreign material and technology is required when infrastructure is built, expanded or repaired rather than every hour that it operates. The boundary is not absolute. Solar farms need replacement inverters, wind turbines need components, batteries degrade and grids require transformers, semiconductors and continual maintenance. A severe disruption in Chinese exports could slow construction and eventually impair existing infrastructure.

Even so, the foreign material throughput required per unit of energy produced is fundamentally different from a combustion system that consumes fuel every time it generates power. A gas-fired power station needs another delivery of gas tomorrow and another after that. A solar farm needs panels, inverters and copper to be built and maintained, but the country that supplied them does not have to send another shipment of fuel every morning. Nuclear power illustrates the same distinction from another direction: many countries import uranium or enrichment services, but nuclear fuel is sufficiently energy dense to be stockpiled on timescales that would be prohibitively expensive for natural gas.

The strategic objective is therefore not autarky. It is to move dependencies towards forms that can be diversified, substituted or stockpiled more easily.

Energy Security Is Not Automatically Green

Geopolitical instability will not produce a neat march towards renewable energy. Governments confronted with an immediate crisis care first about keeping factories operating, homes warm and transport moving. Europe therefore builds solar farms and LNG terminals at the same time. Countries extend the lives of nuclear reactors while subsidising heat pumps. Governments invest in batteries while preserving strategic petroleum reserves. Coal can remain attractive where it is domestically available, while gas-producing countries have an obvious incentive to expand production.

The IEA’s World Energy Investment 2026 projections capture this mixture. Total global energy investment is expected to reach roughly $3.4 trillion in 2026, with around $2.2 trillion going to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emission fuels, efficiency and electrification and about $1.2 trillion to oil, gas and coal. Those numbers should not be read as evidence that war caused the clean-energy investment boom. Falling technology costs, industrial policy, rapidly rising electricity demand and climate policy all matter alongside energy security; data centres and artificial intelligence are themselves becoming important drivers of electricity investment.

What geopolitical shocks change is the value governments assign to alternatives. The same concern about exposure can encourage Spain to install solar, France to invest in nuclear power, Poland to preserve domestic coal and the United States to expand gas production. Energy security has no inherent preference for low-carbon technology; it rewards systems that retain options when one supplier, fuel, route or technology fails.

A resilient energy system is therefore not necessarily the one with the highest share of domestically produced energy, still less one built around a single favoured technology. Renewables, nuclear power, grids, storage, efficiency, LNG terminals and strategic reserves can contribute to resilience in different ways. Climate policy influences which of those options governments want to expand over decades. Geopolitics increasingly influences how urgently they want alternatives available.

From Better Suppliers to Fewer Indispensable Suppliers

The environmental case for reducing fossil-fuel consumption remains unchanged. Nothing about Ukraine or Hormuz alters the physics of greenhouse gases. What the wars have changed is the political coalition that can favour many of the same investments. A solar farm can appeal to someone concerned about climate change, someone worried about industrial competitiveness, someone looking for lower electricity costs and someone with little interest in climate policy who nevertheless dislikes transferring hundreds of billions of euros abroad for energy whose price can be transformed overnight by a distant war.

Those motivations do not always produce identical policies. They clash over nuclear power, domestic gas, mining, subsidies, carbon pricing and Chinese imports. Their overlap is nonetheless larger than it once was. The European Commission now describes clean domestic energy and electrification explicitly as instruments of economic security and resilience against volatile fossil-fuel markets. Language once associated primarily with environmental policy has become part of European security policy.

The first lesson from Ukraine was comparatively easy: do not allow an adversarial state to become an indispensable energy supplier. Europe acted on it with remarkable speed. Russian fossil-fuel imports collapsed, LNG supplies diversified and the assumption that Russian hydrocarbons could be treated as an ordinary commercial relationship is unlikely to return soon.

The second lesson is more demanding because there may be no perfectly safe foreign supplier. A friendly government can change. A pipeline can be sabotaged. A producing state can suffer a revolution. A shipping route can close. A regional war can remove supply from a global market even when Europe itself is nowhere near the fighting. Diversification makes those events easier to absorb; reducing the need for continuously imported fuel goes further.

The logical endpoint is not an economically self-sufficient Europe. Europe will continue importing energy, minerals, components and technology just as it imports almost everything else. The more realistic objective is an economy in which foreign disruption creates inconvenience and higher costs rather than an immediate threat to basic economic functioning. Renewables, nuclear power, electrification, grids, efficiency and storage acquire a significance beyond carbon emissions because each reduces, in a different way, the number of actors abroad whose cooperation is indispensable to keeping the economy running tomorrow.

Russia demonstrated the danger of relying on the wrong supplier. Hormuz demonstrates the vulnerability that remains even after better suppliers have been found. Oil can be embargoed, gas pipelines can be closed and LNG tankers can be diverted. Critical minerals and technology can also be restricted, which is why those supply chains need diversification in turn. But there remains a fundamental strategic advantage in building an energy system whose most important inputs do not need to arrive every day.

No foreign government controls whether the North Sea wind blows. No naval blockade can stop sunlight reaching Spain.