Towards the end of 2023, the world's shipping lanes flickered red on satellite maps.
Houthi drone attacks in the Red Sea had forced oil tankers to reroute thousands of kilometres. Insurance costs doubled overnight. LNG cargoes sat idle. Prices lurched.
It wasn’t just another disruption; it was déjà vu.
Every time a pipeline ruptures, a refinery burns, or a shipping corridor closes, Europe’s, and the world's energy vulnerability is exposed all over again.
And then amid the chaos, a different kind of story started spreading.
As Bill McKibben wrote recently, “It’s hard to drone a solar panel.”
The line is as sharp as it is true. Centralised fossil infrastructure - refineries, depots, pipelines, is fragile, flammable, and geopolitically hostage. By contrast, solar arrays, wind turbines, and heat pumps are distributed, modular, and resilient. You can’t bomb sunlight. You can’t blockade the wind.
That’s why electrification, powered by homegrown renewables, isn’t merely Europe’s decarbonisation plan. It’s its survival strategy.
The Data Says: The Transition Is Now Driving Itself
Two new reports from Ember confirm that something historic is underway.
In Shockproof: How Electrification Can Strengthen EU Energy Security, Ember finds that 58 % of the EU’s primary energy still comes from imported fossil fuels, a higher share than China (24 %) or India (37 %). During the 2021-2024 energy crisis, that dependency cost Europe an extra €930 billion in import bills.
Meanwhile, Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025 delivers a global milestone:
In the first half of 2025, renewables overtook coal for the first time in human history.
Solar and wind supplied 109 % of global electricity-demand growth, meaning every new kilowatt-hour the world wanted was met, and exceeded by, clean energy. Fossil generation actually fell 0.3 %.
Solar alone added a record 306 TWh, up 31 % year-on-year. Its share of global electricity climbed to 8.8 %, nearly triple what it was in 2021.
And the geography of that growth matters.
China accounted for 55 % of new solar generation, the EU 12 %, the US 14 %, India 6 %. Across Europe, solar reached 14 % of the power mix, even becoming the continent’s single largest source of electricity in June 2025.
This is not a slow drift. It’s a structural pivot in the global power system.
The Implications: From Climate Necessity to Strategic Autonomy
1. The climate inflection
Global power-sector CO₂ emissions plateaued in early 2025 even as demand rose 2.6 %. That’s a profound signal: clean generation is now expanding fast enough to meet humanity’s appetite for electricity without adding carbon.
For Europe, where climate law mandates a 90 % emissions cut by 2040, that plateau isn’t a ceiling, it’s a launchpad. Electrification isn’t an environmental luxury; it’s the only route to keep 1.5 °C remotely viable.
2. The security dimension
McKibben’s observation echoes every policy memo in Brussels: centralised energy systems are targets; distributed ones are deterrents.
In Ukraine, Russia’s missile and drone strikes on grid assets showed how brittle fossil infrastructure can be. Refineries and thermal plants burn; solar rooftops endure. Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and homes have begun installing solar + storage micro-systems precisely because they can’t be easily destroyed.
As McKibben notes, “silicon doesn’t explode.”
Each rooftop array, each village-scale wind turbine, each battery-backed clinic adds a sliver of national resilience. Multiply that by millions, and you get a security doctrine hiding in plain sight.
3. The affordability logic
Energy independence is not just about sovereignty; it’s about stability.
The IEA’s latest data show that wholesale solar and onshore-wind costs are now cheaper than new fossil generation in 91 % of the world. IRENA estimates solar’s global cost per MWh has fallen 89 % since 2010.
Fossil prices, meanwhile, behave like a heart-monitor during an anxiety attack.
Europe paid dearly for every spike. Electrification flattens that line, once panels and turbines are built, their “fuel” is free and their operating costs predictable.
The Strategies: How to Make Europe Shockproof
1️⃣ Tax what we burn, not what we use wisely.
Electricity remains over-taxed in most member states, industrial users pay triple the levies imposed on gas. Shift those charges onto fossil consumption or general taxation. Reward flexibility, not inertia.
2️⃣ Treat grids as strategic assets.
Europe has 1,700 GW of renewables waiting in connection queues, the equivalent of the entire existing generation fleet. Unlocking that backlog is the cheapest energy-security policy imaginable. The upcoming EU Grids Package must finance smarter transmission, faster permitting, and digital flexibility so renewables aren’t stranded.
3️⃣ Electrify end-uses.
Transport: Electric vehicles displaced oil imports equal to 11 % of Denmark’s total last year.
Buildings: Heat pumps in the Netherlands already offset 10 % of residential gas demand.
Industry: Two-thirds of EU energy demand can be electrified with proven tech, from low-temperature process heat to electric arc furnaces.
4️⃣ Resist false bridges.
Liquefied natural gas is not a “transition fuel”; it’s a relapse. Carbon capture isn’t an insurance policy; it’s a delay mechanism. Every euro funnelled into new fossil infrastructure is a euro that won’t harden the grid, train the workforce, or scale batteries.
Signals of Change: Proof, Not Promise
The transformation is visible in data, not declarations.
Solar overtook coal in the EU in 2024; globally, renewables surpassed coal in 2025.
Gas demand in the EU is projected to fall 7 % by 2030.
Half the world has already peaked in fossil-fuel electricity generation.
Even defence analysts have begun to take note. Energy security no longer just means naval patrols and strategic reserves, it means megawatts you can’t embargo.
McKibben puts it bluntly: wars now target energy infrastructure. Distributed renewables, by design, deny the enemy a single point of failure. A refinery can be levelled; a million rooftop arrays cannot.
The Human Factor: Ukraine’s Quiet Revolution
Nowhere is that principle more visceral than in Ukraine.
After years of bombardment, communities have begun rebuilding their energy systems from the ground up.
Schools and hospitals now fit solar rooftops with battery basements; heat pumps replace diesel boilers; neighbourhood associations retrofit entire housing blocks. As McKibben reports, these projects have slashed energy bills by half and kept life-saving operations running through blackouts.
And there’s a deeper transformation at work: the skills born of war are becoming the tools of reconstruction. The same technicians assembling drones are learning to wire motors and install renewables. The same veterans who defended cities will soon rebuild them, electrified, decentralised, resilient.
Ukraine is not waiting for peace to start its energy transition; it’s building peace through it.
The Economic Dividend
Every step toward electrification is a hedge against volatility.
Each gigawatt of new solar or wind reduces import exposure, stabilises prices, and keeps euros circulating locally.
The European Commission’s analysis shows that by 2040, fossil import dependency could be halved, from 58 % to 30 %, if electrification accelerates. The efficiency gains alone are staggering: by then, the drop in fossil-fuel demand would be three times greater than the rise in electricity demand.
Put simply: electrification is productivity by another name.
Conclusion: Europe’s Security Doctrine of the Future
When future historians look back at 2025, they may remember it as the year the world discovered its energy systems had options.
Two things happened almost simultaneously:
Fossil energy’s geopolitical fragility became impossible to ignore.
Clean electricity proved capable of powering global growth without carbon.
That convergence redefines power in every sense of the word.
The world's challenge now is to convert momentum into mastery, to build grids that are as flexible as they are vast, policies that reward electrons over molecules, and communities that see energy not as a commodity but as a form of collective defence.
The fossil age built centralised empires; the electric age will build distributed democracies.
Because Bill McKibben is right: you can drone a refinery, but you can’t drone the wind.
And that, at last, is what real energy security looks like.
This article was first published on TomRaftery.com