“Wouldn’t It Be Nice If We Had Green Energy?”

As tensions between Iran and the United States disrupts trade through the Strait of Hormuz, a deceptively simple thought has cut through both political analysis and public debate, all over the world but especially in Europe: wouldn’t it be nice if we had already had a serious green transition? 

That sentence sounds almost naive but in the context of the current fuel crisis it becomes quietly radical. Because what is being exposed is not just a geopolitical conflict, but a structural dependence that has been quantified, analyzed and warned about by green advocates for decades.

Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil consumption passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Around a fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade moves through the same corridor. When the flow is disrupted, the consequences are, as we have seen, immediate. Oil prices can spike by tens of dollars per barrel within days. Insurance costs for shipping surge. Supply chains that depend on fuel, from agriculture to manufacturing, begin to feel secondary shocks. In Europe, energy price volatility has historically translated into inflation increases of several percent within months. A clear example of this dynamic unfolded after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Europe had been heavily dependent on Russian gas, accounting for roughly 40% of pipeline imports, before the war but supplies were rapidly curtailed, triggering a significantenergy shock.

Gas and electricity prices surged to historic highs across the continent, feeding directly into inflation and forcing governments to introduce emergency support measures for households and industry. At the peak of the crisis, wholesale gas prices reached unprecedented levels and even after stabilisation, household gas prices in Europe remained close to twice the pre-crisis levels of 2023. The shock also had structural consequences. Industries dependent on energy, such as manufacturing and agriculture, faced sharply rising costs, while central banks were pushed toward tighter monetary policy to contain inflation. 

Now consider the counterfactual embedded in the article headline. 

If electrification and renewable energy had already reached a dominant position across Europe, the numbers from the two energy-disruptions would still exist, but their significance would be diminished. If transport, heating, and large parts of industry were primarily powered by domestically generated electricity from wind, solar, hydro, or nuclear then a disruption affecting 20 percent of global oil flows or 40 percent of Europe’s gas supply would not translate into systemic risk.

The scale of that difference becomes clearer when looking at current energy structures. Fossil fuels still dominate globally but Europe illustrates the transitional imbalance particularly well. While the EU has pushed renewable electricity to around 40% of energy generation and even higher in countries like Sweden and Denmark, electricity still represents only a fraction of total energy use. Transport remains overwhelmingly dependent on oil and key industrial sectors continue to rely on imported gas. This is why a disruption in a distant maritime chokepoint or a geopolitical shock, such as the sudden loss of Russian gas, can affect so widely across European economies.

If that concentration had already been reduced, the recent crises would not have disappeared but they would have been smaller. A European country where electric vehicles make up 70–80% of the fleet would experience a fundamentally different oil shock than one where they remain below 10%. A power system with 70% renewables is structurally less exposed to imported fuel price spikes than one still reliant on gas imports. These are not abstract scenarios – they are measurable differences in vulnerability that already exist between European member states.

This is where the tone of “wouldn’t it be nice” shifts in the European debate. It becomes less about aspiration and more about timing. Progress has been real: the European Green Deal, the crisis-driven REPowerEU strategy, and the Fit for 55 package have accelerated renewable deployment, efficiency measures and diversification of supply. Russian gas dependence has been sharply reduced but the transition has not yet reached the scale required to fundamentally change exposure.

The result is a system that is partially transformed but still structurally dependent. Enough renewables exist to demonstrate resilience in the power sector but not enough to shield transport and industry when disruptions occur. Critics of the green transition often argue that it cannot yet guarantee full energy security and in a narrow sense they are right. Even highly electrified European systems require grid stability, storage and backup capacity. Supply chains for critical materials remain globally concentrated. No energy system is without risk.

But the comparison has shifted. The relevant question in Europe today is not whether a fully green system would be perfect, but whether it would be less exposed than the current one and the evidence increasingly suggests that it would. Reducing oil and gas dependence does not eliminate vulnerability, but it redistributes and crucially, reduces it.

This is why the current moment feels less like a missed opportunity, and more like a missed threshold. The technology is available, the economics of renewables are increasingly favorable and electrification is scaling rapidly in some sectors and countries. Yet political and social constraints continue to slow implementation. Permitting delays, local opposition, industrial competitiveness concerns and divergent national priorities all shape the pace of change. Adding to this there remains an ideological resistance in parts of the political landscape and among certain societal groups. Despite the fact that green energy has increasingly been demonstrated as both technically viable and economically competitive. In several EU member states, this has become part of a broader political realignment, where energy and climate policy are increasingly framed not only as environmental or economic questions but as cultural and identity issues.

There is also a question of political memory. European energy crises tend to trigger rapid policy acceleration, followed by gradual normalization once prices stabilize. The urgency that drove REPowerEU risks fading as markets rebalance. Investments in LNG infrastructure, for example, have strengthened short-term resilience but may also lock in dependencies if not matched by equal momentum in electrification and grid expansion.

If that pattern repeats, the same structural vulnerabilities will persist into the next crisis. The numbers will remain familiar: a large share of oil passing through narrow chokepoints, a significant portion of energy still fossil-based, transport still dominated by petroleum. And once again, the same question will surface, less rhetorical each time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Europe already had a fully resilient, largely fossil-free energy system?

At some point, that question becomes a test not of technological feasibility, but of political follow-through. Of whether the lessons of successive crises are translated into sustained structural change or simply acknowledged and deferred until the next disruption arrives.