Why the War on Iran Is Accelerating the Shift to Renewables and EVs

What if fossil fuels aren’t energy security at all, but exposure dressed up as realism?
This war is making that harder and harder to ignore.

In this bonus episode of Climate Confident+, I unpack why the US and Israel’s war against Iran is forcing a faster rethink of fossil fuels, renewables, EVs, and electrification. This is a solo episode with me, Tom Raftery, and the stakes couldn’t be clearer: if your economy, business, or household still depends on fuels whose supply and price are hostage to geopolitics, then your energy security is far shakier than most politicians care to admit.

You’ll hear why I argue that fossil fuel dependence is not just an emissions problem, but an exposure problem. We dig into how war-driven shocks hit shipping, transport costs, inflation, industrial margins, and policy. And you might be surprised to learn why renewables, storage, grids, and EVs are starting to look less like climate tech talking points and more like strategic infrastructure for decarbonisation, emissions reduction, and real resilience.

I also break down the numbers from IRENA and the IEA, including the cost advantage of new renewable power, the scale of clean energy investment, and the growing impact of electric vehicles on oil demand. Plus, I share a personal story from the Iberian blackout that brought home just how practical electrification can be in a crisis.

🎙️ Listen now to hear why the energy transition, net zero, and climate policy are no longer just about cutting emissions, but about taking back control.

Transcript

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Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 271 of Climate Confident, and this is another bonus episode of Climate Confident+. My name is Tom Raftery. Before I get into today's topic, a quick note on what Climate Confident+ now is. Until recently, subscribers had exclusive access to the back catalog. I've changed that. Those older episodes are now open to everyone, which makes the podcast easier to find and easier for new listeners to discover. And in place of archive access, what subscribers now get is frankly, more valuable. These bonus episodes published every couple of weeks where I step back from the regular interview format and tackle major climate, energy and geopolitical developments while they're still unfolding. So less archive access, more timely analysis. And today's topic is one that should shake a lot more people outta their complacency than it probably will. It's again about the US and Israel's war against Iran. This war is reckless. It is unnecessary. It is destabilising, and like all wars, it is tragic, first and foremost because of the people being killed, injured, traumatised, and displaced. The human cost always comes first. But there is another consequence of this war that matters enormously for business leaders, policymakers, and anyone thinking seriously about the future of energy. This war is not creating the case for renewables, electric vehicles, and electrification from scratch. That case already existed. What this war is doing is accelerating recognition of that case. It's forcing governments, industries, and households to confront a reality many were still trying not to look at too closely. Fossil fuel dependence is not just an emissions problem, it's an exposure problem because when conflict erupts around oil and gas producing regions or around the routes through which oil and gas must move, the consequences do not stay local. They spread into shipping, into transport costs, into inflation, into fertilizer, and food prices, into industrial margins, into fiscal planning, into politics. Roughly 20% of global oil shipments moved through the Strait of Hormuz before this conflict. Just think about that for a sec. One fifth of global oil moving through one narrow geopolitically fragile choke point. That's not what secure energy looks like. That is concentrated vulnerability. Now, that does not mean every government will respond wisely. Some will double down on domestic drilling, long-term gas deals, or new fossil infrastructure in the name of security. We love learning the wrong lesson first, apparently. But it does mean this war is making the old story much harder to sustain. For years, renewables, EVs, and electrification were too often framed as mainly a climate issue. Important of course, but easy for skeptics to dismiss as moral pressure, investor fashion, or green branding. That framing is weakening because this war is reminding people that fossil fuels are not just carbon intensive, they're also recurring fuel price exposure, geopolitical risk, and macroeconomic volatility. And when that becomes impossible to ignore, renewables and electrification begin to look less like symbolic climate choices and more like practical tools for reducing exposure. Let me be precise here, I'm not saying that renewables are a magic shield. They're not. Clean Energy systems have supply chains. They have bottlenecks. They depend on panels, batteries, transformers, inverters, copper, grid equipment, critical minerals, permitting, storage, interconnection, and better market design. Electricity systems with more wind and solar still need grids, flexibility, storage, and proper planning. But there's still a profound difference between a system that depends on continuously buying and burning fuel, and a system that depends far more on building productive assets upfront and then using local resources like sunlight and wind to power them. That difference matters most in moments like this because once a solar farm is built, it doesn't need a tanker to keep arriving every week. Once an EV is charged, it's less directly exposed to oil price spikes than a petrol or diesel vehicle. Once a factory has contracted more clean power, deployed onsite generation, added storage or electrified parts of its operations, it has reduced at least some of its exposure to fossil volatility. Not eliminated it, reduced it. Irena says 91% of newly commissioned utility scale renewable capacity in 2024 produced electricity more cheaply than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative. It also says renewables avoided 467 billion US dollars in fossil fuel costs in 2024 alone. That doesn't prove every market is fixed. It does show that the cost case for new fossil dependency is looking weaker, not stronger. I think this war is accelerating three rethinks in particular. The first is a government rethink. For import dependent countries especially, this is another brutal reminder that energy security cannot simply mean access to imported fossil fuels. If your economy depends on fuels, that must be extracted, shipped, insured, refined and delivered through fragile corridors, then your energy security is conditional. That is why domestic renewables, storage, grids, electrified transport, heat pumps, demand flexibility and efficiency increasingly look like strategic infrastructure, not just emissions policy. And the capital trend reflects that broader shift. The International Energy Agency says that in 2025, around 2.2 trillion US dollars were spent on renewables, grids, storage, efficiency, electrification, low emissions fuels, and nuclear versus about 1.1 going into oil, gas, and coal. That doesn't mean every dollar is going to solar panels or EVs, but it does mean the direction of travel is clear. Capital is moving towards lower emissions, lower fuel exposure assets. The second rethink is an industry rethink. For organisations, especially those with energy intensive operations, logistics exposure, fleets, physical assets, or complex supply chains, fossil volatility is not some abstract geopolitical story. It lands in the numbers. In operating costs. In procurement risk. In transport costs. In insurance assumptions in planning accuracy in margin resilience. That's why more businesses are starting to treat renewables, batteries, electrification, EV fleets, and long-term power contracts, less as sustainability theater, and more as ways to lock in more predictable economics. And that distinction matters because once the energy transition moves outta sustainability teams and into treasury, operations, procurement, and risk committees, it stops being optional theater and starts becoming structural. The third rethink is at the consumer and household level, especially around transport. Oil shocks have a very immediate way of clarifying things. They force people to think about what they drive, what it costs to run, and how exposed they are to price spikes that they cannot control. That's why EVs matter so much in this story. They're often framed as climate products, but they're increasingly also understood as a way to reduce oil dependence and smooth transport costs over time. The International Energy Agency says electric vehicles displaced more than 1.3 million barrels a day of oil demand in 2024, and they predict EVs could displace more than 5 million barrels a day by 2030. And remember, the International Energy Agency's predictions around EVs and renewables have consistently proven to be very, very conservative. That's not a side story anymore. This is a serious structural dent in oil demand, and I got a very direct reminder of the resilience side of this during the Iberian blackout last year. Like millions of others, I lost power at home. But because I have a Kia EV3, with the vehicle to load capability, I was able to run critical devices in my house directly from the car. That changed the whole character of the outage. Yes, it was still disruptive, but it stopped being a crisis, and I was even in a position to offer electricity to neighbors if they needed it in. In our case, power returned after about five hours, so that wasn't necessary, but other parts of the country were offline for far longer. Now I'm not pretending one EV in one driveway is a substitute for, you know, sound grid policy. It's obviously not, but it is a useful illustration of a broader point. Electrification can increase the number of options available to households and businesses, especially when paired with storage, better grid design, and more distributed energy infrastructure. So where does this leave us? I think it leaves us with a much clearer strategic question, not how do we survive the next fossil fuel shock a bit more gracefully, but how do we reduce the number of economies, businesses, and households that remain exposed to fossil fuel shocks in the first place? That means moving faster on renewables, faster on grids, faster on storage, faster on EVs, faster on building electrification, faster on industrial electrification, where it's feasible, faster on efficiency, faster on the wider system that makes cleaner energy workable at scale, not because that removes all risk. It doesn't. But because it reduces one particularly destructive form of risk dependence on fuels whose supply and price remain entangled with geopolitical, try again, but because it reduces one particularly destructive form of risk, dependence on fuels whose supply and price remain entangled with geopolitics, choke points and conflict. And policy makers need to be careful here. The wrong lesson from a war like this is to say. Fossil fuels are insecure, so let's build more fossil infrastructure for security. That's how temporary panic hardens into long-term lock-in. The better question is more demanding, but more durable. Build the alternatives faster. Build the domestic generation, build the grids, build the storage, build the charging, build the flexibility, build the resilience. Because every crisis like this that reminds governments and businesses how exposed they are to fossil volatility also makes the case for lower exposure energy systems harder to ignore. So when I say this war is accelerating a rethink, I do not mean the transition suddenly started because of it. I mean, it is making existing trends more legible, more urgent, and more strategically compelling. And that is why the sentence I want you to remember from this episode is this. This war is not creating the case for renewables and electric transportation. It is sharpening recognition of a case that was already there. Fossil fuels leave economies exposed to recurring instability while renewables, electrification, grids and storage reduce that exposure over time. That, to me, is the real significance of this moment. Not that war teaches us anything noble it, it does not. War is failure. This war is a humanitarian tragedy. It is a geopolitical disgrace and an economic act of enormous self-harm on a global scale. But it is also making one thing harder to deny. The more dependent you are on fossil fuels, the more exposed you are to chaos you do not control. And the more seriously you invest in renewables, electrification, grids, storage, and efficiency, the more room you create to take back some of that control. That does not redeem the horror, but it should sharpen the response. Now, if you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who should hear it, A colleague, a policymaker, a client, someone in your organisation who still thinks the energy transition is mostly about ESG PowerPoint decks and nice language. And if there are topics you'd like me to tackle in future Climate Confident+ episodes, send them on to me. These episodes are meant to be timely, useful, and responsive to what's happening now. The regular Climate Confident schedule continues as usual every Wednesday. Next Wednesday, the 22nd of April, I'll be back with a full interview episode featuring architect Alex Sexsmith. And that one is a fascinating conversation about regenerative and bio-based building approaches. But for now, thanks a million for supporting Climate Confident Plus Talk soon, Tom.