Transmission the key for energy transition

The blockading of the Strait of Hormuz following the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East has done what a decade of climate summits could not: it has stripped the energy transition of its moralizing upholstery, revealing its raw geopolitical core. For decades, governments and corporate boardrooms treated alternative energy as an expensive, ethically comforting hobby – a concession to environmental conscience rather than a strategic imperative.

Today, with the global economy reeling under a severe fossil-fuel supply crunch, alternative energy is recognized for what it truly is: the ultimate instrument of national sovereignty. A survey of the global energy landscape in 2026 reveals a striking paradox. Humanity possesses the technologies required to break its dependence on fossil fuels and achieve a secure, low-carbon future. In many respects, the transition is already underway. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, global renewable-energy capacity added a record 692 gigawatts last year – a 15.5 percent annual surge – bringing clean power to nearly half of the world’s installed electricity capacity.

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For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, renewables have overtaken coal in the global electricity mix. Solar energy alone generated 2,778 terawatt-hours of electricity last year, enough to replace all the liquefied natural gas that ordinarily transits the Strait of Hormuz. Unfortunately, progress remains constrained by political, regulatory, and financial choke points. The challenge is no longer technological feasibility; it is the inability of institutions, markets, and infrastructure to keep pace with technological advancement.

The single greatest bottleneck in the energy transition is not the solar panel or the wind turbine. It is the wire – the transmission infrastructure, the high-voltage grids that carry electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed – which has simply failed to keep pace with the explosion in clean-energy capacity. Globally, millions of megawatts of renewable power currently sit stranded, waiting years, and in some cases up to a decade, for a grid connection.

Renewable-energy projects are being built faster than electricity networks can absorb them. The reasons are varied but interconnected. In many countries, permitting processes remain labyrinthine, involving multiple agencies, overlapping jurisdictions, and lengthy environmental reviews. Transmission projects frequently encounter local opposition, land-acquisition disputes, and political resistance. Financing remains uneven, particularly in developing economies where the cost of capital is significantly higher than in industrialized nations.

As a result, some of the regions with the greatest renewable-energy potential like Africa continue to struggle to attract the investment needed to realize it. Storage presents a second major challenge. Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are abundant but intermittent. The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. While battery technologies have improved dramatically and costs have fallen over the past decade, large-scale storage deployment remains insufficient to guarantee uninterrupted supply.

Without robust storage systems, countries remain dependent on fossil-fuel-based backup generation during periods of low renewable output. The transition also faces a less visible but ominously significant geopolitical challenge: Petro-regimes from the Gulf to Central Asia have spent years cultivating dependencies that function as instruments of leverage. Oil and gas are not merely commodities; they are the structural guarantees of a certain world order.

Every solar panel that displaces a barrel of oil is a small withdrawal from that guarantee. The resistance is therefore not passive inertia but active engineering – regulatory friction sponsored by fossil fuel lobbies. Geopolitics is also responsible for affecting supply chains that support clean-energy technologies. Solar panels, batteries, rare-earth minerals, and advanced manufacturing components are concentrated in a handful of countries. This concentration creates new forms of dependency even as nations seek to reduce old ones.

Energy security in the twenty-first century is increasingly tied not only to access to oil and gas but also to access to lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and the industrial ecosystems required to process them. Amidst this conundrum India offers an interesting case study – not for its rhetoric, but for its drive to circumvent the issue. Deriving over 53 per cent of its cumulative installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources, India has beaten its Paris Agreement commitment by five years.

Its solar footprint has expanded fifty-five-fold in the past twelve years, crossing 155 gigawatts. These are extraordinary numbers for a country of 1.4 billion people at varying stages of economic development. The Khavda Renewable Energy Park – already operational at 9.4 gigawatts of hybrid solar-wind capacity, paired with a 3.37 gigawatt-hour battery storage system – is designed to reach 30 gigawatts at completion. An integrated clean energy operating system, five times the area of Paris, has been built to prove that intermittency is a surmountable engineering problem, not an existential limitation.

Through the International Solar Alliance, India is also building the institutional architecture for a clean energy south-south cooperation – helping nations bypass the petro-state dependency trap by pooling technical knowledge, reducing procurement costs through aggregated demand, and advocating for reformed capital access in multilateral forums. While gaps, based on interdependencies, remain, the Indian template is one worth adopting. It is evident that political courage and coordinated international will are key to solving this issue.

Governments must prioritize grid modernization with the same urgency that previous generations devoted to highways, ports, and telecommunications networks. Regulatory frameworks need simplification and greater coordination across agencies. Investment in energy storage must accelerate, supported by both public policy and private capital. International cooperation is required to diversify supply chains and ensure that critical minerals are sourced responsibly and sustainably. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has performed a useful, brutal clarification.

Energy transition is no t an environmental debate. It is a sovereignty argument. Those that allow commercial interests and petro-state pressure to stymie their progress will find themselves, as the crisis deepens, not merely environmentally exposed but strategically defenceless. The nations that break through the gridlock – by building transmission, mobilising capital, and deploying clean technology at scale – will sever their dependence on a 19th-century resource model that has always doubled as a geopolitical leash and secure a ‘cleaner’ future.

(The writer is a former CEO and independent commentator on socio-cultural issues.)