From Putin’s pipelines to Iran’s war, Europe is still paying the price for its own energy insecurity |
For three days last month, Europe’s leaders said things at the Munich Security Conference that would have been unthinkable just a year ago.
Listen to this article
Merz declared that the post-war rules-based order “no longer exists.” Macron called on Europe to become “a geopolitical power.” Ursula von der Leyen announced “a true European awakening.” Starmer is imploring us to build “hard power, because that’s the currency of this age.”
I have followed the Munich Security Conference closely for over a decade — including during the five years I worked for Angela Merkel, helping shape her public communications. I have never witnessed anything like this. The tone wasn’t despair,it was resolve. To me though, the message extends far beyond defence spending.
Merz put it most sharply: Europe has just returned from “a holiday from history.” He is right. But ending that holiday does not simply mean more Eurofighters and ammunition stockpiles. It means fundamentally rethinking what makes a continent resilient — and that includes energy systems, industrial capacity, supply chains, and the critical climate technologies needed to power the 21st-century economy.
The real meaning of strategic autonomy
The conversation in Munich was framed around defence, and rightly so. European defence spending has surged by nearly 80% since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At this rate, Europe’s defence investment will exceed what the United States spent on military equipment last year by 2028.
But listen more carefully to what Europe’s leaders actually said. Macron explicitly called for “policies of European preference” across AI, cloud computing, critical minerals, clean tech, and defence industries.
Von der Leyen urged Europe to break down the divide between civilian and defence sectors, and accelerate dual-use technologies. Merz committed Germany to climate agreements and the WHO - in direct contrast to the Trump administration.This line drew the loudest applause of his entire speech.
Something has shifted. The Greenland crisis, Trump’s tariffs, JD Vance’s incendiary speech in Munich last year, the growing realisation that America’s security umbrella comes with conditions Europe cannot always accept — all of this has compressed years of strategic debate into months of political action.
The EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act, the European Competitiveness Fund, the Chips Act, and the Critical Raw Materials Act — these are no longer Brussels talking papers. They are legislative instruments designed to rebuild European industrial sovereignty.
And this is where climate tech becomes a security story.
Europe’s hidden arsenal
Here’s a fact that rarely makes it into security conference speeches: Europe is the global leader in clean energy tech patents. The EU accounts for more than a fifth of all high-value cleantech inventions worldwide. Cleantech patent filings at the European Patent Office have grown by nearly 65% over the past decade — faster than any other technology field. In batteries and smart grid technologies alone, growth has been exponential.
This is not by accident. It is the product of decades of investment in world-class research institutions, regulatory frameworks that incentivise decarbonisation, and a generation of founders who understood that the green transition is the largest market opportunity of our lifetimes. Europe doesn’t just have ideas. It has companies turning these ideas into hardware.
European startups are pioneering battery recycling that recovers critical minerals at industrial scale, cutting dependence on foreign supply chains.
They are building zero-emission electric aircraft on track for commercial regional flights by 2030. Or building quantum computers that will optimise energy grids and materials discovery. Or producing cocoa-free chocolate ingredients and other food staples domestically that Europe currently imports from vulnerable global supply chains.
And one, Space Forge, has just fired up the first commercial semiconductor manufacturing tool ever operated in orbit, growing crystals up to 4,000 times purer than anything produced on Earth. The wide-bandgap materials it produces — gallium nitride, silicon carbide, diamond — underpin power electronics, communications, and defence platforms of the future.
These are not laboratory curiosities. These are companies with corporate customers, world-leading milestones, institutional backing and regulatory approval. They sit at the exact intersection of what Munich was really about: the technologies that make a continent sovereign.
From climate policy to economic security
The old framing — that climate policy is a cost to be borne — is dead. It was already dying before Munich, but the 2026 MSC has buried it deep in the ground.
Consider what energy dependence actually costs. Between 2021 and 2024, fossil fuel imports cost the EU €1.8 trillion — nearly double what they would have cost at pre-crisis prices. Europe still imports 58% of its primary energy, a higher share than China or India. EU wholesale gas prices remain roughly five times those in the US. Every euro sent abroad for hydrocarbons is a euro not invested in European capacity, European jobs, European technology.
Germany’s reliance on Russian gas was not only a climate failure. It was a security failure, too. Europe’s dependence on Chinese solar panels, batteries, and rare earth minerals is not a trade inconvenience. It is a strategic vulnerability — one that Beijing has shown it is willing to exploit. As it did when it restricted gallium and germanium exports critical to semiconductor production worldwide.
And yet the pattern persists. Russian pipeline gas may have diminished, but global LNG markets remain tight, Venezuelan output remains constrained by sanctions and instability, and now Middle Eastern supply routes are again under threat as the US and Israel begin a major conflict with Iran. Europe has diversified suppliers — but not eliminated exposure.
Every European battery cell manufactured on European soil is a unit of sovereignty. Every megawatt of renewable energy generated domestically is a barrel of oil not purchased from a petrostate. Every critical mineral recycled from end-of-life products is a supply chain that cannot be weaponised against us. Every semiconductor grown in European orbit is a chip that no foreign power can embargo.
This is the logic now animating EU industrial policy. The leaked Industrial Accelerator Act — which would impose binding “Union-origin” requirements on public procurement, subsidies, and auctions across batteries, solar, wind, hydrogen, heat pumps, and grid technologies — is the most concrete expression yet of a Europe that has decided to back its own industrial base. It is not protectionism for its own sake.
It is the economic equivalent of what Merz is doing with the Bundeswehr: building capacity because dependence is no longer an option.
This vulnerability is not theoretical. This week’s escalation in Iran — and the direct targeting of energy infrastructure in the Gulf — triggered a 45% spike in wholesale gas prices in a single morning on Monday alone. Markets did not wait for missiles to land on European soil. They reacted instantly. Because in an energy system built on imports, every conflict is domestic.
Europe does not need to be a party to a war to pay for it. When energy flows through chokepoints thousands of kilometres away, geopolitics becomes an electricity bill.
The lesson is the same as in 2022: volatility is the tax we pay for dependence.
The optimism no one expected
What struck me most about Munich was not the gravity of the diagnosis. We all know the world has changed. What struck me was the energy. There was more alignment between European leaders — across party lines, across the Channel, across old Franco-German divides — than I have witnessed in years. Merz and Macron discussing nuclear deterrence. Starmer declared Britain is “not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore.”
Von der Leyen invoking Article 42(7), the EU’s mutual defence clause, with the simplicity it always deserved: “One for all and all for one.”
If Europe brings this same energy to its industrial and climate agenda, the results will be transformative. The continent has a combined GDP nearly ten times that of Russia. It has 450 million consumers. It invests more than $10 in clean energy for every $1 in fossil fuels — one of the highest ratios in the world. It has the patents.
It has the founders. It has the regulatory architecture. What it has lacked is the political will to act at the speed and scale the moment demands.
That is changing. Not gradually. Rapidly.
Climate leadership is economic security
The founders I work with every day did not need Munich to understand this. They never took a holiday from history.
They have spent years building the infrastructure of European sovereignty — in battery recycling plants, in aircraft hangars, in quantum labs, in orbital furnaces — often with too little capital, regulators that move too slow for them, and too little recognition from a political class still debating whether industrial policy was a good idea.
Yet Europe’s greatest vulnerability is not innovation but scaleup capital. My team’s analysis of Dealroom and CleanTech Group data shows European climate tech companies face a persistent Series B funding gap averaging 20% below US rounds, amounting to a $13.5 billion shortfall between 2020 and 2024. Europe has invested $34 billion in early-stage climate startups, only to see too many stall before industrial deployment.
The root cause is structural: too few funds are able to write $25–100 million cheques and far less institutional capital — just 30% of venture funding versus 72% in the US. If Europe wants technological sovereignty, it must mobilise pension funds, insurers and banks to finance its own champions.
Munich showed that Europe’s leaders have finally caught up. They now speak the language of resilience, of autonomy, of strategic capacity. Good. But speeches do not build supply chains.
What critical climate tech founders need now is concrete: procurement contracts that favour European-manufactured clean technologies. Capital markets structured to fund hardware companies from first factory to industrial scale — bridging the Series B valley of death that has killed too many European deep-tech champions.
Permitting regimes that do not take longer than the technology development itself. And a political class that internalises, once and for all, that the country that manufactures the battery, the chip, and the electrolyser is the country that writes the rules of the next century.
Europe has the technology. It has the talent. And for the first time in my lifetime, it appears to has the political will. The holiday from history is over. Now the real work begins.
_______Danijel Višević, is a General Partner at World Fund
LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.
To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk