Power plays: why national security drives the energy transition

Renewables are inherently more secure 

For more than a century, energy security has been about controlling fuel supply - through domestic extraction, alliances, or military intervention. Fossil fuels by nature are geographically concentrated and therefore create dependency. They must be extracted, refined, and transported across fragile, complex, and geopolitically sensitive supply chains. 

Renewables can change all this. Wind and solar do not rely on imported fuel, and once built they generate power without ongoing exposure to volatile global markets. No country can threaten to turn off another’s wind or sunshine. A country with strong renewables, storage, and grid infrastructure is far less vulnerable to supply shocks, embargos, or price manipulation. 

Power generation from renewables is also inherently distributed over a wider area than large fossil plants, meaning that an outage in one area can be more easily contained. The wind and the sun are everywhere, meaning it is quite possible to establish renewables close to demand. The advent of microgrids can enable critical installations, such as hospitals, schools, industrial plants and military bases, to maintain a local power supply even in the event of a wider blackout. 

Of course, the equipment for all of this infrastructure must still be sourced – the wind turbines, batteries, solar panels, switchgear, cables and more. This means a big reliance on the supply chain for critical minerals, which is well known to be geopolitically fraught. At the same time, those minerals need to be manufactured into the end product, and here most countries face a clear choice: buy the equipment from China or take far longer and spend a lot more money manufacturing it at home. That has raised many to fear this is simply replacing one dependency with another [1]. However, that is a false equivalence anchored in a fossil fuel way of thinking. Fossil fuels require constant replenishment; they are fuels after all. However, renewables are infrastructure, and once the equipment is installed it does not need a constant stream of imported fuel. No system is perfect, but an energy system based around renewable infrastructure, rather than fossil fuels, is inherently more resilient. 

The Ukraine war laid this reality bare. In 2022, Russia’s invasion forced Europe to confront its decades-long reliance on imported fossil fuels, contributing to 41GW of solar deployment in a single year [2]. The shift was not driven by climate targets. It was a direct response to the brutal lesson that dependency on fossil fuels is a national security risk. If Europe had accelerated its transition years earlier, Putin’s weaponisation of energy would have been far less effective. But this is not just about Russia. Any nation that relies on imported fossil fuels is exposed to external leverage. 

Ukraine: a case study in energy infrastructure on the front line

Russia has relentlessly targeted Ukraine’s power infrastructure, launching missile and drone strikes against power plants, substations, and transmission lines. Over the past two years, Ukraine’s grid has been battered, repaired, and battered again. Yet despite these attacks, Ukraine’s engineers have pulled off astonishing feats to keep the lights on and are some of the big heroes of the war [3]. The UK has played a tremendous role here too, alongside many other allies, with leading British energy companies stepping up to provide Ukraine with as many spare parts as can be mustered. However, the fact that Ukraine’s electricity generation was always highly centralised in large coal and nuclear power plants, and that those plants were already old and nearing end-of-life, has been a major challenge. A small number of large power plants simply makes for a small number of large targets for missiles and drones. 

Decentralised renewables, distributed storage, and interconnection with Europe all have a critical role to play in maintaining power supply. Local solar and battery systems now provide critical backup power to hospitals, schools, industrial plants and ongoing military operations. Ukraine’s energy crisis has become a live experiment in how distributed renewables strengthen resilience in wartime conditions. This is why initiatives such as the Ukraine Energy Security Marshall Plan are so important to enabling Ukraine to stand up to its aggressor and win the war. 

But energy resilience is not just about surviving missile strikes. It is also about surviving political instability among allies. For decades, Europe has relied on a stable transatlantic alliance to underpin its energy strategy. But what happens when those alliances become uncertain?  With the US positioning itself as a fossil fuel leader, yet stepping back from international institutions and associated obligations, how many European countries will be drawn by the allure of cheap US oil and gas, only to create an even greater dependency on a newly unpredictable partner? The hard truth is this: self-sufficiency is now an imperative. In a world where political cycles in Washington can determine whether NATO commitments are honoured, the case for energy independence has never been stronger. 

China’s energy transition: a national security strategy

This is where China has been far, far ahead of the rest of the world for several decades. The story of the energy transition is increasingly the story of China, as the scale of its investment into renewables, EVs, and grid infrastructure is simply unmatched, and so too its dominance over manufacturing and supply chains. But whilst there is clearly an underlying economic incentive, that was not always the case. Long before renewables were cheap and back when there was no real market for batteries, China took a strategic decision to invest and build these markets. And there is a strong argument that it did so not for the climate, and not necessarily for the direct economic opportunities (which were far from guaranteed), but for its own national security.  

For decades, China’s reliance on imported fossil fuels has been its greatest strategic weakness. The country imports 70% of its oil, much of it transported through chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, a vulnerability that a geopolitical crisis could rapidly expose. That is why China’s leadership made a strategic bet on renewables. By dominating solar, wind, batteries, and EVs, China has reduced its exposure to global energy markets while securing control over the supply chains that will power the world’s future energy system. 

The numbers are staggering. In 2023 alone, China installed more solar capacity than the entire US solar fleet [6]. It produces over 80% of the world’s solar panels, 77% of its batteries, and 60% of its wind turbines [7]. Its state-backed companies have locked up critical mineral supplies across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. This dominance gives China a level of energy independence that few nations can match, giving it a clear security advantage over its adversaries [8].