The shock doctrine of clean energy

Few events have so abruptly collapsed the boundary between energy policy and national security as the US–Israel war on Iran that erupted in February 2026. The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggered what the International Energy Agency described as the largest oil supply shock on record —driving up energy prices, fueling inflation in Europe, and disrupting supply chains worldwide. 

Yet the conflict’s most consequential legacy may be measured not in barrels or basis points, but in gigawatts. The Hormuz disruption has acted as a strategic accelerant for the clean energy transition, not by suddenly improving the economics of renewables, but by turning energy independence from a policy priority into a pressing political imperative. What policymakers once advanced on climate or cost grounds, they are now pursuing with greater urgency. The result is a compressed, crisis-driven transition that is geopolitically shaped, uneven, and at times contradictory, but increasingly tilted toward decarbonization.

A transition already underway

The war did not create the clean energy transition; it intersected with one already well underway. By 2025, according to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, renewable energy was meeting all new global electricity demand, with new clean generation exceeding demand growth and displacing fossil fuel output in net terms. Solar power accounted for the bulk of this expansion, while battery storage capacity has scaled rapidly as costs have fallen sharply over the past several years.

Investment trends reinforce this picture. Global spending on the energy transition reached a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, according to BloombergNEF, with major flows into renewable generation, grids, and storage infrastructure. Even in the United States, despite policy headwinds at the federal level, clean energy additions have consistently outpaced fossil fuel capacity additions, and most planned new generation remains renewable.

The key point is that this momentum predated the conflict. The war did not initiate the transition; it entered a system already in motion, increasingly capitalized, and technologically mature. Its effect has been less about starting change than about reducing political hesitation among governments already balancing fossil fuel dependence against clean energy deployment.

From priority to necessity

The IEA’s executive’ director, Fatih Birol, put the structural argument plainly, stating that countries will lose trust in fossil fuels, and their perception of risk and reliability will change. He expects that energy strategies will be revised and that the boost to renewables and nuclear power will be significant. The war has effectively settled a long-running policy debate, namely that energy security and energy transition are complementary, not competing, objectives. Homegrown renewable generation, by definition, cannot be blockaded.

Behavioral change is already visible. France, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Turkey have recently announced new clean energy investments and initiatives. Behavioral change is already visible. France, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Turkey have recently announced new clean energy investments and initiatives. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, has called for faster rollout of grid and electrification plans, through its AccelerateEU plan, while the Charging Ahead roadmap from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners projects that accelerated electrification could sharply reduce fossil fuel imports, lower power prices, and supply most electricity from domestic clean sources by mid century. These shifts reflect not climate ambition alone, but the roughly €24 billion rise in European Union fossil fuel import costs in the weeks following the war’s outbreak.

Public opinion is aligned with this shift. A Politico survey of more than 6,000 people across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland found that around 60 percent want Europe to either speed up or maintain its transition to renewables, with 39 percent — the single largest bloc — supporting acceleration even if energy prices rise in the short term. Only 17 percent said the EU should prioritize the cheapest energy sources regardless of environmental impact. Political conditions rarely align so clearly with structural economic incentives; when they do, policy change tends to be rapid and durable.

South Korea illustrates the pattern clearly. With 97 percent of its energy imported and around 70 percent of its oil coming from the Middle East, it was highly exposed to the Strait of Hormuz disruption. In April 2026, it responded with a sweeping plan: rapid expansion of renewables to 100 gigawatts by 2030, a shift toward a more decentralized and flexible grid, and an ambition to rank among the world’s top three green manufacturing hubs. As President Lee Jae Myung put it: “The Republic of Korea must move very quickly toward renewable energy … our future will be at serious risk if we continue to rely on fossil fuels.” This reflects strategic reorientation rather than incremental policy change.

China’s strategic ascendancy

If the war has imposed costs and strategic recalibration on importers across Europe and Asia, it has created an extraordinary strategic opportunity for one actor: China.

China’s position entering this crisis was already formidable. Over the past decade, it transformed from the world’s largest emitter of CO₂ into the undisputed leader of the electrical energy revolution. It has
installed more solar and wind than the rest of the world combined. It dominates the supply chains for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, rare earths, electrolyzers, and electric vehicles — what Chinese state media and industry analysts call the ‘new three’ export categories that have replaced clothing, appliances, and furniture as growth drivers. The country’s massive state investment in green energy industries had already bolstered its energy self-sufficiency, substantially reducing its exposure to the very oil shock now rattling importing nations.

The conflict has accelerated this advantage. Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries, and electric vehicles all reached record highs in March 2026, according to Ember’s analysis of Chinese customs data — a combined increase of 70 percent year over year. Chinese EV and hybrid exports hit record levels in the same month, up 140 percent year over year, as rising oil prices globally accelerated adoption decisions that might otherwise have been deferred. Battery exports reached $10 billion in March alone, with particularly high growth rates in the EU, Australia, and India. China is not merely a beneficiary of the energy transition; it is, increasingly, the infrastructure of it. This creates path dependence in which electrification itself reinforces China’s position in upstream manufacturing and downstream deployment.

This is a profound geopolitical development. Nations seeking to insulate themselves from fossil fuel price shocks by deploying renewables are, in large part, substituting one form of import dependence for another — this time, denominated in Chinese solar panels, battery cells, and grid technology. As senior research fellow Jeong Won Kim of the Energy Studies Institute at the National University of Singapore observed, China has been viewed as a low-cost supplier but is increasingly seen as a long-term partner in the energy transition. This represents a structural reorientation of global economic and technological relationships that will compound over decades.

China itself faces a strategic tension in this position. Overdoing leverage risks fostering international rivals and losing market share, a recognition that export controls in renewable energy, unlike in semiconductors, would be self-defeating if they accelerate the development of competing supply chains. The rational Chinese strategy is therefore to maximize market penetration while managing over-dependence concerns among client states. This is precisely the posture one would expect from a hegemonic supplier seeking to entrench rather than antagonize its customer base.

The United States: Structural divergence from strategic purpose

The contrast between China’s position and that of the United States is striking, and increasingly difficult to rationalize as a coherent strategy. The Trump administration has dismantled federal clean energy initiatives, canceled billions in funding for decarbonization technologies, imposed permitting obstacles that add cost and delay to solar and wind projects, and effectively halted clean energy development on federal lands through signature requirements and process delays. The administration’s posture is premised on fossil fuel dominance — an attempt to leverage America’s hydrocarbon abundance as a geopolitical instrument.

The strategic inconsistency is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The U.S. seeks to outcompete China as the defining strategic rivalry of the century yet has ceded to China the commanding heights of the industrial technologies that will define the coming energy era. While Washington pursues oil dominance, Beijing is consolidating control over the supply chains, manufacturing capacity, and technological standards of the post-fossil fuel economy. The Iran war has made this divergence more consequential, not less. Countries that might have remained in fossil fuel incumbency by inertia are now actively choosing energy sovereignty through electrification. That choice runs through Chinese supply chains, not American ones.

Within the U.S. itself, market forces continue to override federal policy signals. In 2025, the U.S. installed more than nine times as much clean power capacity as it did fossil fuel kit. This year, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports, 93 percent of all new planned American energy capacity will be green. And in March, for the first time, the U.S. got more electricity from renewables than from gas, typically the biggest American source. In California, battery storage capacity has grown more than 2,000 percent since 2019, transforming the state’s energy mix. Electricity demand is rising nationally as AI data centers proliferate, and much of that demand is being met by new renewable and storage capacity.

Contradictions and risks

A sober assessment must also reckon with the countervailing pressures and real risks embedded in this accelerating transition.

The most immediate issue is coal. While an oil and gas shock might be expected to accelerate a shift toward coal, early data shows a more mixed picture. Overall fossil fuel generation fell in the first month of the war, with solar and wind offsetting more of the decline in gas than coal. But this masks regional divergence. Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and parts of India are under pressure to rely more on coal in the near term, even as renewable investment rises. In Asia, where coal has not yet been fully displaced, the transition remains uneven. India, for example, has announced it could meet half its electricity demand from renewables ahead of schedule, but grid constraints continue to limit reliable delivery.

Big Oil, meanwhile, is not passive. The surge in energy prices has given major oil companies a windfall that is being deployed into exploration in Africa, South America, and the eastern Mediterranean — territories previously considered uneconomic or abandoned. Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies are rebuilding reserve portfolios with renewed capital. This is rational corporate behavior under a price regime that makes previously marginal fields commercially viable. It also represents an extension of fossil fuel infrastructure that will have consequences for emissions trajectories well into the 2030s and 2040s.

These dynamics reflect three simultaneous forces shaping the transition, namely accelerated demand substitution toward electricity, intensified fossil fuel reinvestment, and heightened supply-side volatility.

The fracturing of OPEC adds a further layer of instability. The UAE, whose oil and gas infrastructure was damaged by Iranian strikes and has announced its exit from the cartel, now has both strategic and commercial incentives to produce and sell as much oil as quickly as possible — before both Hormuz disruption and long-run demand erosion make its reserves worth less. This accelerates near term supply competition among fossil fuel exporters at precisely the moment when the long-run case for oil is weakening. The result is a volatile energy market likely to feature periods of both supply glut and supply shock, neither of which provides a stable foundation for planning.

Conclusion: The irreversibility question

The central question is whether the acceleration triggered by the conflict will endure. Historical precedent offers caution. The 1973 oil crisis and subsequent price spikes produced bursts of clean energy investment that faded as markets stabilized.

Today’s conditions differ in important ways. The cost competitiveness of renewables and storage technologies no longer depends on high fossil fuel prices. Electrification is economically viable across a wide range of scenarios, making the transition structurally self-sustaining.

What the current crisis has altered is the political dimension. By reframing energy independence as a matter of national security, it has strengthened the alignment between economic incentives, public opinion, and state policy. The question is therefore not whether the transition continues, but how uneven, contested, and geopolitically mediated it becomes along the way.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Track the real‑world impact behind the sustainability headlines. illuminem's Data Hub™ offers transparent performance data and climate targets of companies driving the transition.