Last week, families across Europe and Asia were not staring at maps of missile trajectories. They were staring at prices. Petrol. Diesel. Shipping. Insurance. Flights. Electricity futures. Food, next. That is how modern war arrives for most people now: not first as a headline, but as a surcharge.
And that matters.
Because the economic violence of a fossil-fuel-centred conflict does not stay in the blast radius. It propagates through tankers, terminals, traders, power markets, fertiliser costs, supermarket shelves and public budgets. Quietly at first. Then all at once.
The war involving the US, Israel and Iran is a brutal reminder that energy security built on combustible liquids moving through narrow waterways is not security at all. It is dependency, wrapped in military jargon and sold as realism. The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the most dangerous single points of failure in the global economy. A fifth of the world’s oil transit passed through it in 2024. A chokepoint that narrow should terrify any serious policymaker. It certainly should terrify any finance minister. Yet here we are, still allowing national prosperity to hinge on whether tankers can thread a few dozen miles of contested water without being hit, boarded, delayed or priced out by war-risk insurance.
Now set that beside the opportunity cost.
Using the composite loss figure supplied here, roughly $88.7 billion was burned in the first 17 days of this conflict through direct military expenditure and wider economic damage. That figure is illustrative rather than audited. War accounting is famously slippery, because governments are allergic to telling the full truth when the bill arrives. But even if the real number ends up somewhat lower or higher, the order of magnitude is the point.
And the point is obscene.
Because when I stress-test the clean-energy side of the equation using current IRENA cost benchmarks, that same $88.7 billion could instead buy roughly:
128 GW of utility-scale solar, using a 2024 global average installed cost of $691/kW.
85 GW of onshore wind, using a 2024 global average installed cost of $1,041/kW.
462 GWh of battery storage, using a 2024 global average installed cost of $192/kWh.
Those are not boutique pilot-project numbers. They are system-shaping numbers. Numbers that alter import dependence, price volatility, grid stability and strategic posture.
The data says…
Start with the war itself. Public reporting indicates the Pentagon told Congress that the first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost $11.3 billion, excluding smaller expenses and the cost of continuing operations. Israeli officials, meanwhile, warned that wartime restrictions were costing the Israeli economy around $3 billion per week under severe disruption conditions. Financial markets reacted in the way they always do when fossil infrastructure meets geopolitics: oil spiked. Brent crude moved above $105 per barrel as traders priced in supply risk and the disruption of flows through Hormuz.
That is the fossil fuel tax in real time.
Not a carbon tax. Not some imagined green penalty. A war tax. Imposed by oil dependence itself.
Now compare that with where energy economics actually are in 2025 and 2026. According to the IEA’s World Energy Investment 2025, global investment in solar is expected to reach $450 billion in 2025, making it the single largest item in world energy investment. According to IRENA’s 2025 reporting on 2024 costs, 91% of newly commissioned utility-scale renewable power projects delivered cheaper electricity than the lowest-cost new fossil alternative. New onshore wind averaged $0.034/kWh. New solar PV averaged $0.043/kWh. And renewables commissioned in 2024 helped avoid $467 billion in fossil-fuel costs.
Pause on that for a moment.
The same system that tells us endless military spending is regrettable but necessary also now has to contend with a very inconvenient fact: the cheapest route to energy security is increasingly not drilling, escorting and bombing. It is building.
The storage story is even more striking. Utility-scale battery storage costs fell to around $192/kWh in 2024, down 93% from 2010. At that price, the implied daily war burn rate in this conflict, around $5.2 billion per day, could buy roughly 27 GWh of battery storage every 24 hours.
Every day.
That means one week of equivalent spending could finance about 190 GWh of storage. The full 17-day total could finance around 462 GWh. For context, ERCOT’s August 2025 peak demand was just under 84 GW. So on a simple energy basis, 462 GWh could cover that sort of peak for roughly five and a half hours. Not forever, obviously. Batteries are not magic. But five and a half hours at Texas-peak scale is not trivial. It is the difference between a grid that bends and a grid that breaks.
Solar tells a similar story. 128 GW of utility-scale solar, at a conservative 20% capacity factor, would generate roughly 224 TWh per year. Using the EIA’s average US household consumption of about 10,500 kWh per year, that is enough annual electricity for more than 21 million homes. Onshore wind at 85 GW, assuming a 34% capacity factor, lands in the same ballpark. One war’s opening bill. Millions of homes.
This is the real scandal. Not just that war is expensive. Everyone knows war is expensive. It is that the alternative has become so economically compelling, so scalable, so strategically sensible, and leaders still keep reaching for the most wasteful option on the shelf.
The implications…
This matters first as a security question.
For decades, energy security has been treated as a military problem. Secure supply. Protect shipping lanes. Stabilise producer states. Maintain deterrence. Keep fuel flowing. But that framework belongs to an earlier era. It made grim sense in a world where hydrocarbons were structurally unavoidable and clean alternatives were either costly or marginal. That world is over. Politicians may not have noticed. Lobbyists certainly hope they do not. But the economics have changed.
Domestic renewables, storage, grids and electrification reduce exposure to hostile geography. They shrink the leverage of petro-autocrats. They reduce the strategic value of chokepoints. They make price spikes less contagious. They harden economies against coercion.
You cannot embargo sunlight in Seville. You cannot blockade wind in Cork. You cannot cause a global price shock in Kansas because a battery in Texas charged at noon and discharged at 8 pm.
That is not idealism. That is engineering.
It matters second as an affordability question.
Military spending does create activity, yes. So does rebuilding after a flood. So does repairing a broken window. Human civilisation occasionally rediscovers Bastiat and then forgets him again in time for the next budget cycle. A missile does not become productive because it is expensive. Once fired, the capital is gone. The return is ash, debt and procurement paperwork. A solar farm, by contrast, produces electricity for 25 years or more. A wind farm does the same. A battery arbitrages price spreads, provides balancing services, reduces curtailment and improves system reliability. These are productive assets. They pay back.
Third, it matters for resilience.
Fossil-heavy systems are exposed not just to conflict, but to logistics. Tankers. Pipelines. ports. Refineries. storage terminals. single-point failures. Clean systems are not invulnerable, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling incense. They rely on wires, inverters, transformers, software, supply chains and sane planning. But they are far more modular. Damage is less likely to cascade in the same way. A distributed portfolio of solar, wind, storage and demand flexibility is harder to knock out than a centralised chain of fuel extraction, transport, refining and combustion.
Kismet: one of the strangest twists in all this is that war is now helping make the case against the very fuels wars are often fought around. Every oil shock is effectively a live advert for electrification.
The strategies…
So what should leaders do?
First, stop treating clean energy as climate policy alone. It is industrial policy. Security policy. Cost-control policy. resilience policy. The framing matters because budgets follow framing.
Second, build storage at the scale the numbers now justify. Not token megawatts announced with ribbon-cutting theatre, but system-scale procurement. Fast-track interconnection. Reform market design so flexibility gets paid properly. Storage is no longer the side dish. In grids with high solar shares, it is becoming the cutlery.
Third, accelerate electrification where alternatives are already superior: passenger transport, urban buses, heat pumps, industrial low-temperature heat, and an increasing slice of freight and process energy. Every unit of demand shifted from volatile fossil fuel markets to domestically generated electricity weakens the geopolitical transmission mechanism of war.
Fourth, treat grid investment as strategic infrastructure. The weakness in many power systems is no longer generation cost. It is wires, queues, permitting and planning. Governments that still obsess over the cost of renewables while ignoring grid bottlenecks are arguing with 2015 while losing 2026.
Fifth, tell the truth about security. The old claim was that fossil fuels made nations strong. The actual record is messier: import dependence, inflation shocks, naval patrols, subsidy burdens, strategic reserve releases, and endless diplomatic contortions around unstable suppliers. Strength lies in optionality. In diversity. In local generation. In flexibility. In efficiency. In storage. In electrified demand that can move, shift and respond.
The signal of change…
The encouraging part, and there is one, is that the transition is already happening.
IRENA reports that the world added 582 GW of renewable capacity in 2024, a record annual increase. The IEA says solar investment alone is hitting $450 billion this year. California’s grid-scale battery fleet has grown from 500 MW in 2019 to more than 13,000 MW under CPUC oversight in 2025, and batteries were already providing an average of 8.6% of CAISO’s energy during the late afternoon and evening peak hours in 2024. Ember’s analysis shows that in sunny locations, pairing solar with batteries is already pushing close to round-the-clock clean electricity.
That is the signal leaders should be reading.
Not that the world has solved everything. It has not. Not remotely. But the core economic logic has flipped. Clean power used to need moral arguments because the financial case was not always enough. Now, more and more often, the financial case stands on its own. The moral case simply makes the indictment harder to ignore.
And so we return to the family looking at prices.
This is what serious leadership should understand: every new solar plant, every wind farm, every battery installation, every upgraded grid line, every electrified bus depot, every heat pump rollout, every efficiency measure is more than a climate action. It is a small act of geopolitical defiance. A refusal to let household budgets, national strategy and industrial competitiveness remain hostage to fossil chokepoints and the men who profit from them.
We cannot unspend the first 17 days of this war.
But we can learn from them.
Because if $88.7 billion can vanish into munitions, disruptions and panic-pricing in less than three weeks, then the argument that the energy transition is somehow too expensive should finally be laughed out of the room. The money exists. The technology exists. The economics are no longer in doubt.
The question is whether leaders want assets that keep paying society back, or invoices that keep arriving with smoke still rising from the page.
If they choose wisely, the next time tensions flare in a narrow stretch of water half a world away, fewer families will feel it in their fuel tank, their heating bill, their grocery trolley or their mortgage.
That would be a better definition of security than anything a destroyer can provide.
Citations
Pentagon reported first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost $11.3bn; continuing costs excluded. Association of Defense Communities, 2026.
Israel Finance Ministry warning that wartime restrictions were costing the economy around $3bn per week. Times of Israel, 2026.
Oil prices rose to around $105 Brent / $101 WTI as markets priced in conflict and Hormuz disruption. Financial Times, 2026.
The Strait of Hormuz carried about 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption in 2024. U.S. EIA, 2025. (US EIA)
Global investment in solar expected to reach $450bn in 2025. IEA, World Energy Investment 2025. (IEA)
In 2024, 91% of new utility-scale renewable projects were cheaper than the cheapest new fossil alternative; renewables avoided $467bn in fossil-fuel costs. IRENA, 2025. (IRENA)
2024 global average renewable costs used for recalculation: solar PV $691/kW, onshore wind $1,041/kW, battery storage $192/kWh. IRENA, 2025. (Sustainability Magazine)
Average US household electricity use around 10,500 kWh/year. U.S. EIA, updated 2023. (US EIA)
ERCOT August 2025 peak demand was roughly 83.7 GW. ERCOT, 2025. (ERCOT)
California batteries provided an average of 8.6% of CAISO balancing area energy in late afternoon and evening peak hours in 2024; California had grown to 13,000+ MW of grid-scale battery storage in 2025. CAISO and CPUC, 2025. (caiso.com)
Global renewable additions reached about 582 GW in 2024. IRENA, 2025. (IRENA)
Solar-plus-battery systems are increasingly capable of delivering near-24/365 clean power in sunny regions. Ember, 2025. (ember-energy.org)
Green investment delivers higher employment effects than fossil-fuel spending; one frequently cited PERI study found roughly 7.5 jobs per $1m in renewables versus 2.65 in fossil fuels. PERI UMass, 2016. (peri.umass.edu)
This article was originally posted on TomRaftery.com
Photo credit Keith Davenport on Flickr