Fossil
fuels? No thanks. Why Trump’s Iran war is pushing EU toward renewables.
EU
countries may argue about the short-term fixes for high energy prices, but
agree that clean power is the best long-term bet.
March 18,
2026 6:00 am CET
By Zia
Weise
BRUSSELS
— If Donald Trump had wanted Europeans to buy more oil and gas, perhaps he
shouldn’t have bombed Iran.
Although
the continent’s energy supply remains secure, prices for fuel and electricity
have soared since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Tehran in
late February.
In their
scramble to curb the sudden increase, some governments saw an opportunity to
attack the European Union’s green legislation, while others seized on rising
fossil fuel prices to argue that the bloc needs to double down on climate
action.
But the
war-driven cost shock has reminded Europe’s green skeptics and supporters alike
that their resource-poor continent is vulnerable to volatile import prices as
long as oil and gas constitute a core part of its energy mix.
From
Spain to Poland, governments this week united around one message: Europe needs
to speed up its transition away from foreign fossil fuels and toward domestic
clean power.
“We are
living in a geopolitically unstable environment. So we have to reduce our
dependency on imported fossil fuels,” Bulgarian Environment Minister Julian
Popov, currently part of the country’s caretaker government, told POLITICO.
“I mean,
do we want to be a petro-state or petro-union or petro-continent without petro
resources?” he asked. “It’s totally ridiculous. We have to accelerate our
electrification.”
The
energy price surge following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine led to a
systemic drop in gas consumption in Europe, and the current situation could
well have a similar effect, Dutch Climate Minister Stientje van Veldhoven said
in an interview Tuesday.
The Iran
crisis “provides a very strong incentive to all countries to carefully evaluate
their use of oil and gas and to see how they can decrease not just their
geopolitical dependency, but also the impact that it has on their economy and
social stability,” she said.
For the
U.S., that means one of its best customers is losing interest. The continent is
the main recipient of American liquefied natural gas, and Trump has sought to
ensure that Europeans buy even more of its fossil fuel exports.
Yet
inadvertently, his attack on Iran has stoked calls for Europe to go in the
opposite direction.
The price
of dependence
The
current price shock is several orders of magnitude smaller than the 2022 energy
crisis, which sent European gas prices above €300 per megawatt-hour. This
week's price hovered around €50, compared to around €30 before the Iran war.
Still, as
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote in a letter to EU
leaders Monday, “the increase of fossil fuel prices is already weighing on our
economy.”
Since the
U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran, which prompted Tehran to effectively
block the Persian Gulf to shipping, the EU has “already spent an additional EUR
6 billion on fossil fuel imports — a direct reminder of the price we pay for
our dependency,” she added.
At a
summit in Brussels on Thursday EU leaders will argue over the best way to
tackle energy prices in the short term. As for long-term policy, governments
see largely eye to eye.
“Becoming
independent of oil and gas is one of the key issues, as is once again evident
with the crisis we are facing ... due to the conflict in the Middle East,” said
German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider on Tuesday, calling for a faster
buildout of renewable energy and power grids.
On
Monday, his Latvian colleague Kaspars Melnis told reporters: “If you talk about
energy prices, what we can do, it's [producing] more and more our own renewable
energy.”
Lesson
learned
Europe’s
push for more renewables — and, in some countries, for nuclear power — draws
from the lessons of the 2022 crisis.
“It's
important for me to underline that we are in a much better situation in the EU
now than we were in ‘22. Why? Because we have more renewables in our system,
because we've diversified our supply in general in our energy system, because
there's less hours where it's gas that sets the price for electricity,” said EU
energy chief Dan Jørgensen on Monday.
Von der
Leyen, in Monday's letter, noted that the share of renewables in the EU’s
electricity mix has surged from 36 percent in 2021 to nearly 50 percent now.
While
costly gas tends to set the overall electricity price in the EU system, the
higher the share of clean electricity a country has, the lower their costs. In
renewable-powered Spain, research has found, energy prices increased far less
than in gas-dependent Italy.
But it’s
not just Spain and other green-minded countries that are seeing the Iran war as
a reason to ditch fossil fuel imports.
“I'm
seeing that even colleagues who, let’s say, when climate was the reason for
discussing this, had their concerns … but they also see that the burden of
these consequences [from the Iran war] is a very important reason to act,
because it reduces those costs,” said van Veldhoven, the Dutch minister.
Even in
Warsaw, where climate tends to be a politically toxic issue, the soaring energy
costs are spurring a push to expand renewables.
“I want
to make it clear to all the skeptics that renewable energy sources, above all
else, are the most sovereign energy source for Poland,” said Polish Prime
Minister Donald Tusk on Tuesday. “The war in Iran clearly demonstrates how
dangerous dependence on external energy supplies can be.”
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