By Stanislav Romaniuk
For the last two decades, renewable energy has been framed primarily as a moral necessity, a way to address climate change and safeguard the planet for future generations. Environmental activists and experts pushed governments toward greener policies largely on this basis, even as oil companies kept drilling and posting record profits. With Donald Trump back in the office and his “drill, baby, drill” agenda in force, the era of climate-driven energy policy may be losing momentum, at least in the United States.
But the case for moving away from fossil fuels no longer rests on climate idealism alone. For middle powers – states with meaningful economic and regional weight but without the scale or leverage of a global superpower, from the UK and Ukraine to Brazil, the transition to renewable energy has become a matter of economic survival and strategic positioning in a fast-changing world order. As old alliances fray and the existing international system is tested on multiple fronts, every nation is being forced to make difficult adjustments to secure its place in it.
Energy should sit at the center of these states’ strategic planning, for a simple reason: energy underpins everything, from electricity and heating in every household to the power-hungry data centers now driving the global economy. In a world where governments are increasingly unsure which alliances will hold, whoever controls the energy supply chain gains outsized leverage, and states that are energy-independent gain a level of sovereignty that dependent states simply do not have. Energy policy today is being reshaped not by climate idealism but by economic volatility, geopolitical fragmentation, and technological acceleration. In this context, green energy is no longer simply about decarbonisation, it is becoming a form of economic infrastructure, as critical to long-term stability as transport networks, digital connectivity, or financial systems. The question facing governments is no longer whether renewable energy is environmentally desirable, but whether continued dependence on fossil fuels is still economically rational in a world defined by price shocks, supply disruptions, and rising strategic competition.
This article makes the case across three fronts: the economic argument for renewables as a source of price stability, the security argument for renewables as a form of strategic resilience, and the growth argument for renewables as the infrastructure that will determine who captures the next wave of technological development.
The Economic Case
Fossil fuels have long been defended on the basis of affordability and reliability. Recent years have exposed how fragile that assumption really is. Global energy markets have become highly volatile, subject to geopolitical conflict, trade restrictions, and sudden shifts in supply. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered a global energy crisis: according to Statista, natural gas prices globally rose nearly elevenfold between summer 2020 and summer 2022. The pattern repeated in 2026, when American strikes against Iran and Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent Brent crude up 3.4% to $78.59 a barrel, according to The Guardian – up from around $72 before the confrontation, and as high as $120 at its peak. The shock rippled through European and Asian markets, hitting airlines particularly hard and pushing up plane tickets prices. In the longer run, continued uncertainty over Gulf supply routes threatens to raise energy bills further, with low-income households likely to be hit hardest. Price spikes like these translate directly into inflationary pressure, fiscal strain, and social instability – costs that rarely show up in simple energy price comparison. Renewable energy offers a way out of this volatility: every country can build capacity based on the resources it has, gaining independence and predictability that imported fossil fuels cannot match. Renewables are capital-intensive upfront, but they carry low marginal costs and, crucially, stable long-term pricing.
A recent IRENA report makes the competitiveness of renewables explicit: in 2024, solar photovoltaics were on average 41% cheaper than the lowest cost fossil fuel alternative, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. Overall, the onshore wind was the most affordable new electricity source at $0.034/kWh. The 582 gigawatts of renewable capacity added globally in 2024 avoided an estimated $57 billion in fossil fuel costs, and 91% of new renewable power projects commissioned that year undercut any new fossil fuel alternative on price. Once built, renewable infrastructure is largely isolated from the external shocks that keep hitting fossil fuel dependent economies.
For states seeking long-term investments into their economies, predictability that comes with renewable energy is often worth more than energy that is nominally cheaper but volatile. Economic planning, industrial strategy, and technological investment all depend on stable expectations, which is exactly what energy systems independent from external price shocks provide. Energy dependence, by contrast, has quietly become one of the most underestimated strategic vulnerabilities of modern states. Reliance on imported fossil fuels creates exposure to foreign suppliers, vulnerability to geopolitical leverage, and structural trade imbalances that translate into constrained political choices during a crisis. Energy autonomy does not mean isolation, it means reducing the dependencies that leave a state open to external coercion.
The Security Case
Beyond price stability, renewable energy offers something fossil fuel infrastructure structurally cannot: resilience under attack. Centralised power generation is a handful of large refineries, thermal plants, or pipelines that represent concentrated and vulnerable targets. Destroy a small number of nodes, and an adversary can collapse a national grid, and with it, a war economy. Ukraine has lived this reality since 2022, as Russian strikes have systematically targeted thermal and hydroelectric plants precisely because their concentration makes them efficient targets.
Distributed renewable generation is structurally harder to eliminate this way. DTEK’s Tyligulska wind farm on Ukraine’s Black Sea, set to be the second largest onshore wind farm in Eastern Europe and generate enough electricity for 900,000 households annually, constructed within artillery range of the front line, has become something of a proof of the concept. The distributed generation approach – assets spread across a wide area – have proven to be more resilient to bombardment than single large facilities. Rinat Akhmetov, DTEK shareholder, has described the approach as a “foundation for economic growth” for the country that is fighting a war. After noticing the effectiveness of decentralised power generation, DTEK has announced its investments into building the Poltavska Wind Farm, which, once completed, will become the largest wind farm in Eastern Europe. A state’s energy security, in other words, is no longer just about where its energy comes from, but about how many places at once it comes from.
The same shock transmission logic was explored above, where a conflict thousands of miles away can spike prices and destabilise unrelated economies, reinforcing the case. The Hormuz Strait episode is a reminder that centralised global fossil fuel markets can transmit a shock from the Gulf to a household energy bill in London within days. Distributed, domestically generated renewable capacity isolates a country not only from attacks on its own soil, but from someone else’s war on the other side of the planet.
Renewables as a Growth Engine
Energy security is not only a defensive concern; it is fast becoming the precondition for capturing the next wave of economic growth. Nowhere is this clearer than in artificial intelligence infrastructure, which is proving to be extraordinarily energy hungry. The United Kingdom offers a cautionary example: AI data-center projects are running into a hard wall of grid capacity, with some developers facing over a decade-long wait for a connection and among the highest industrial electricity prices in Europe. All of this together forces AI developers to choose more attractive countries to build their centers rather than the UK, and if the situation will not change in the nearest future, the UK risks losing developers that already operate on British soil. In contrast, Brazil has taken the opposite approach, marketing its abundant hydro, wind, and solar capacity explicitly as its pitch to hyperscalers, and has already attracted billions of dollars in committed AI infrastructure investment from Microsoft and Amazon as a result. This national strategy is aiming to draw in $350 billion over the next decade. China, for its part, has built out renewable generation capacity at a scale that gives it a structural cost and capacity advantage for the compute-heavy industries of the coming decade. It is a gap the UK and other middle powers risk falling behind on the longer their grids remain a bottleneck rather than an asset.
None of this requires an economically utopian leap. Costa Rica has run its electricity grid on renewables at rates above 95% for over a decade, drawing on hydro, geothermal, and wind, without requiring extraordinary state investments. Ukraine, even mid-war, has attracted large private investment in its energy sector since the beginning of the full-scale invasion to build wind capacity. The pattern in both cases is the same: once the underlying economics work, and as the IRENA data above shows, in most markets today they already do, governments do not need to fund the transition themselves. What they need to provide is land, permissions, and a stable regulatory environment; private capital, already competing for cost-effective and predictable generation, does the rest.
Conclusion
Renewable energy was once framed as a long-term moral obligation, to be pursued once economies could afford it. That framing is now the wrong way round. For middle powers navigating a more volatile, fragmented, and competitive world, renewable energy is the economic and strategic infrastructure that determines whether a state can free itself from external price shocks, withstand attacks on its energy system, and compete for the industries that will define the next decade of growth. States that treat the transition as optional are not preserving flexibility – they are accumulating risk. The states best positioned for the next decade will not be the ones that debated the transition longest, but the ones that built the infrastructure first.
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