On 28 February 2026, US and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iran. Within hours, global energy markets were in turmoil.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply and a large share of its liquefied natural gas. When the shooting started, commercial tanker traffic through the strait ground to a near standstill. Insurance premiums surged. Then, on 2 March, Iranian drones struck QatarEnergy’s production facilities at Ras Laffan, knocking out around 19% of near-term global LNG supply almost overnight. Europe’s benchmark gas contract, the Dutch TTF, jumped nearly 50% in a single session — the largest one-day move since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — briefly breaking through €63 per megawatt-hour, against €32 the week before. Brent crude approached $120 a barrel at its peak. For many Europeans watching the headlines, the feeling was familiar. Here we go again.
But something was different this time.
German and French wholesale electricity prices fell during the same week that gas markets were convulsing. That detail is worth sitting with.
Oil and gas surging while electricity holds steady — even dips — is not a coincidence. It reflects a structural change that has been quietly building for years. According to Ember, the energy research group, wind and solar together supplied 30% of EU electricity in 2025, surpassing fossil fuels for the first time on record. Five years earlier, that figure was 20%. In Germany, renewables already account for around 56% of net public electricity generation. Rabobank has estimated that without the cushion provided by renewable output, European power prices would currently be roughly a third higher than they are. For context, Dutch TTF gas futures peaked at €311 per megawatt-hour in August 2022, at the height of the last crisis. The current shock is real, but it is operating on a different scale.
The logic is not complicated. In a power market, prices are set by the marginal generator — the last plant needed to meet demand. When gas is expensive, gas-fired plants push prices up. But solar and wind have near-zero fuel costs. When sunshine and wind flood the grid with cheap electricity, they displace gas plants from the pricing queue and drag the market price down. This spring, that effect is unusually strong. BloombergNEF forecasts German solar output to rise around 25% year-on-year in April, with wind generation up approximately 70%. France’s nuclear fleet, which was badly degraded during the last crisis, is in far better shape. Analysts at the London Stock Exchange Group noted that Germany has been recording low or even negative prices during peak solar hours since mid-February — a phenomenon that normally does not appear until April.
Markus Krebber, chief executive of German energy group RWE, put it plainly: renewables offer stability precisely because they are not tied to imported fuels. The observation sounds simple. But it captures something that is often missing from the public debate about the energy transition — that solar panels and wind turbines are not just a climate policy. They are a form of geopolitical insurance. Every kilowatt-hour generated from domestic sunshine or wind is one fewer kilowatt-hour whose price can be held hostage by events in the Strait of Hormuz.
That insurance, however, is not complete.
Europe’s gas storage position is a serious vulnerability. According to Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank, European gas inventories stood at around 46 billion cubic metres at the end of February 2026 — well below the 60 billion recorded a year earlier and the 77 billion in February 2024. Analysts expect storage to end March at only 22 to 27% of capacity, against a five-year average of around 41%. Europe will need to inject an enormous volume of gas over the summer refill season to reach safe levels before next winter, at exactly the moment when the LNG market is tightest.
There is also a more fundamental physical constraint. What happens when the sun goes down?
During daylight hours, solar generation suppresses prices — sometimes below zero. But as evening arrives and output fades, the grid falls back on gas-fired plants to fill the gap. The high price of gas then flows straight through into electricity costs. Earlier this month, evening power prices in the Netherlands briefly exceeded €400 per megawatt-hour. Germany saw similar spikes. The protection that renewables offer is unevenly distributed across the day: a buffer in the afternoon, a gap after dark. Battery storage is scaling up, but nowhere near fast enough to close that window. The evening peak remains the weak point in Europe’s new energy architecture.
What this crisis offers, then, is a rare real-world test. For years, the case for the energy transition rested largely on climate arguments — emissions targets, long-term responsibility, the costs of inaction. Those arguments remain valid. But the electricity market data from the past few weeks makes a different, more immediate case. A power system built on domestic wind and solar is structurally less exposed to the shocks that travel through fossil fuel markets. The more of your electricity that comes from sunlight and wind harvested at home, the less vulnerable your economy is to decisions made — or disruptions caused — on the other side of the world.
Krebber said after the crisis began that the signal to invest in electrification, and to break free from fossil fuel import dependency, is now stronger than it was before the war started. The direction is clear. But the gaps are real too — inadequate storage levels, exposed evening hours, industrial energy costs that remain stubbornly high across much of the continent. None of these are solved yet.
Every step forward in the energy transition is a reduction in exposure. Not a guarantee, not a complete solution — but a measurable, compounding reduction. For now, that is the most honest thing the data can tell us.
