Above, UK PM Keir Starmer:
“What gives us control is renewables. Our own home-grown energy which is then more secure and more independent.
That’s why I think we should go further and faster on renewables.
Let’s get control of our own energy…so we don’t have to keep worrying that our bills are going to go up”
The Iran war has plunged the world into an overnight energy crisis. The closure of the Hormuz Strait and reduced Middle East energy exports have sparked fears of higher bills for already stretched households.
But one European country is well placed to weather these shocks thanks to its investment in renewable energy.
Since 2019, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity, adding over 40 GW – more than any other EU country except Germany, whose power market is twice the size of Spain’s.
As a result, Spain’s electricity price is much less influenced by the ever-fluctuating cost of gas, which increased by 55 per cent the day after the Iran war started and has continued to rise.
“Spain’s wind and solar growth has reduced the influence of expensive fossil generators on the electricity price by 75 per cent since 2019. This decline in the hours where the electricity price was tied to gas power cost was faster than in other gas-reliant countries, such as Italy and Germany,” according to a report by energy think tank Ember, published in October last year.
Experts agree that reliance on fossil fuel imports leaves countries dangerously exposed.
“The turmoil we are witnessing today in the Middle East makes it evident that we are facing a global energy system largely tied to fossil fuels – where supply is concentrated in a few regions and every conflict risks sending shock waves through the global economy,” says UN Secretary General António Guterres.
Spain’s energy bills are some of the lowest in Europe
According to Ember’s report, between 2020 and 2024 Spain “cut its power sector import bill more than any other EU country.” It did this by adding new solar and wind farms which “avoided 26 billion cubic metres of gas imports costing €13.5 billion”.
Spain did not use coal-fired power at all in August 2025. A far cry from just 10 years before, when coal accounted for a quarter of Spain’s power.
Its pivot to renewables has been a big win for household energy bills. In 2019, prior to Spain’s wind and solar revolution, it had some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Now it has some of the cheapest.
“Spain started [2026] with some of the cheapest power prices in Europe, a trend that continued into the first week of March”, says Ember report authors Chris Rosslowe.
Investors made wealthy by the Middle East’s abundant oil and gas increasingly are turning to Africa’s clean energy sector. They are attracted by rising electricity demand, rapid urbanisation and the continent’s growing role in global supply chains tied to critical minerals and manufacturing.
A report released last month by the Clean Air Task Force found that more than $101.9 billion (€88.8bn) had flowed into Africa’s renewable energy sector from Gulf countries by the end of 2024, led by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and state-backed companies are unlikely to scale back these renewable energy investments, despite disruptions from the Iran war, analysts say, given the strong long-term economic and strategic reasons driving such funding.
Germany is seeing unusually strong solar power output in March, helping to cap electricity prices even as the conflict in the Middle East drives up the cost of energy worldwide.
The country’s solar installations will feed more than 40 gigawatts of electricity into the public grid at noon on Friday for the fifth day in a row, according to data from the Fraunhofer Institute. Last year, there were only four days with this level of solar generation in the entire month of March.
“In the short term, high solar output definitely dampened prices,” said Stephan Späth, meteorologist and power trader at ANE. “It was very sunny not only in Germany, but also in neighboring countries.”
