This opinion article was originally published by Euractiv on 17 March, 2026.
Within days, disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz – through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG flows – sent oil and diesel prices surging, showing how quickly uncertainty around distant chokepoints can reverberate through European economies.
But this was far from being the first reminder of how quickly energy disruption impacts daily life. A suspected arson attack on grid infrastructure left up to 45,000 households in Berlin without power in freezing January temperatures. Modern societies are tightly interconnected systems, and when electricity, heating, communications, water and logistics fail together, political consequences quickly follow.
It’s a lesson Europe would do well to learn, and fast. Energy is still often treated as a technical market file, and sometimes a climate file. But in security terms, it’s now a frontline vulnerability. Dependencies are rising across the energy system, but they are not all equal.
All energy systems carry dependencies. Fossil fuel supply chains rely on continuous flows across exposed infrastructure. Clean energy systems depend on critical minerals and complex manufacturing chains. The security question is which system can be designed with diversification, storage and resilience built in.
There is a structural security argument here that Europe has been slow to make: fossil fuel-powered grids are centralised by design – large plants, long transmission lines, concentrated chokepoints – which makes them easier to identify, target and disable. A faster transition to distributed clean power is not just a climate or industrial imperative, it’s a way of making the grid harder to attack.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine’s energy grid remains the clearest warning of what sustained pressure looks like. And it’s why the debate must extend beyond defence budgets to civil defence: in modern conflict, the decisive factor is not only what happens at the front, but whether societies can sustain power, water and digital systems under sustained pressure.
The aim is often both psychological and political: make daily life unlivable, then present “peace” on the attacker’s terms. Europe cannot assume it would show the same steel as Ukraine under such sustained disruption.
Europe’s strategic blind spot is in its failure to integrate energy resilience into national security thinking. Vulnerabilities are systemic and increasingly compounded by climate extremes: limited storage and flexibility, inadequate spare capacity, uneven cross-border grid integration, constrained manufacturing capacity for critical grid components and materials, and expanding cyber exposure as grids become more digitalised. These are open invitations, especially in an era where sabotage, cyber operations and coercive trade policy blur into the same toolkit.
This is why energy resilience must be understood simultaneously as a security, industrial and climate priority. Resilient civilian energy systems are deterrence infrastructure. A more decentralised energy system, backed by storage and robust cyber protection, reduces single points of failure and makes coercion harder to achieve. It strengthens deterrence by raising the cost and lowering the payoff of disruption.
There are already EU policy vehicles that can be pulled into this frame. The European Commission’s European Grids Package, for instance, is designed to speed up and coordinate the build-out of electricity infrastructure. Implemented as a narrow efficiency exercise, it will help the energy transition. Implemented with a security lens, it can harden Europe against coercion.
That means building resilience requirements into how Europe plans and builds grids: spare capacity where single points of failure exist, rapid repair capacity and spares for high-voltage equipment, and “security by design” for the digital grid. It also means aligning this work with national civil-defence planning and NATO resilience expectations, so that energy operators, municipalities and emergency services are preparing against the same threat assumptions.
NATO’s resilience agenda needs the same shift from rhetoric to operational planning, with common planning assumptions, joint stress tests, and regular exercises that involve grid operators, municipalities, emergency services, water utilities, telecoms providers and industry. A crisis will not respect institutional boundaries, so preparedness can’t either.
A society that cannot keep the lights on, factories humming, and its people warm and fed cannot sustain military operations or political unity for long. Energy grids are part of Europe’s defensive line, and must be treated accordingly.
This text is an opinion article originally published by Euractiv, authored by Tom Middendorp (Clingendael Institute). To read the article on Euractiv, follow this link.
Photo credit: Michael Pointner on Unsplash