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Reflections: Amid conflict, a green awakening emerges
By David Bishop
As I write this, the war in Iran is still ongoing but we have at least been given a two-week reprieve before US President Donald Trump follows up (or doesn’t, as has often been the case lately) on his much criticised threat to wipe out “a whole civilisation”. Confusion abounds. We have seen increased fuel prices due to the increase in the price of oil, food prices are sure to increase, and any hope we may have had of more interest rate decreases has almost certainly been eliminated – in fact, some economists are even warning of potential rate increases.
It seems repugnant to talk about any “good” that could come from a conflict that has seen a death toll estimated in the thousands and the destruction of key infrastructure like roads, bridges, refineries and even desalination plants. However, the war, and resultant energy shock it has caused, may turn out to be the catalyst for increased investment in, and adoption of, green technology.
While accurate, quantifiable figures are very hard to come by (and usually require a longer time frame to be worth using as a measure), there are signs from numerous European countries that show this move being driven by consumers.
In the United Kingdom, for example, Euro News reports that sales of heat pumps (which run on electricity rather than gas, and are reportedly much more efficient than traditional “boilers”) increased by 51% in the first three weeks of March, while solar sales increased by 54%. In Germany, enquiries about solar systems and heat pumps have increased by about 30% since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, according to Bloomberg.
It is not just at home that people are looking to break their dependence on fossil fuels either, with Reuters reporting that enquiries for electric vehicles have increased across France, Romania, Portugal and Poland, with one French online used-car retailer seeing sales almost double between the middle of February and 9 March.
This customer-led push for renewables is encouragingly being echoed in the “halls of power”, with German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider telling an EU summit that “becoming independent of oil and gas is one of the key issues”, while his Latvian counterpart, Kaspars Melnis, said that the bloc needs to look at producing “more and more of their own renewable energy”
Of course, there are also those who argue that the problem is not being reliant on oil and gas but rather being reliant on oil and gas from the “wrong places”.
But it is not only Europe that is looking for alternatives, because China, which is already the world’s leading source of clean energy technologies (but sadly at the same time the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases), has said that it plans to accelerate its renewable energy transition and source more energy from alternative suppliers. This despite the fact that its grid is already more than 50% powered by renewable energy and electric vehicles make up more than half of all new car sales.
Of course, there are also those who argue that the problem is not being reliant on oil and gas but rather being reliant on oil and gas from the “wrong places”. The increased price of oil has once again incentivised exploration and the expansion of existing infrastructure, with calls in the United Kingdom for renewed drilling in the North Sea, a Canadian company saying that they plan to massively expand their liquefied natural gas export facility and the Trump administration suggesting that it was willing to pay a French company US$1 billion to abandon plans to build offshore windfarms and pursue fossil fuel projects instead.
It also makes sense that, locally, we have seen calls for the expansion of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Nigeria and the Cabinda Refinery in Angola so that African countries can source their petrol and diesel from the continent.
In Namibia we are of course all still waiting for when our own oil pipelines will come on-stream, but perhaps we, as well as the rest of the world, should be looking a little more closely at how Spain has managed to navigate the current crisis long before it started.
Research by global energy think tank Ember shows that the cost of energy in Spain has increased far less than in fellow EU states such as Italy, which relies heavily on oil and gas for energy production. According to Ember’s report, Spain “cut its power sector import bill more than any other EU country” between 2020 and 2024. It did this by doubling its wind and solar capacity, so much so that it did not use coal-fired power at all in August 2025.
Renewables still have their issues, mainly related to storage, but as I said earlier, if it is acceptable to say that something good has come from this bad situation, it can only be that more and more people are now starting to “think green”.
Until next time, enjoy your journey.
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