The Iran war has painfully brought that point home. Comparing Monday (23 March 2026) to the day before the war started (27 February), UK wholesale gas prices and wholesale spot electricity prices have risen by more than 81% and more than 43% respectively. Although electricity generated from natural gas has fallen from just under 30% (on 27 February) to 10% (23 March) of the UK electricity mix, UK electricity demand is also just seasonally lower (10%).

Imagine if the UK were faced with these prices on 5 January when every natural gas plant was turned on in the UK and natural gas accounted for over 55% of the electricity mix. UK industrial companies, whose energy demands do not naturally decline when it gets warmer and who are not protected by a price cap, will suffer the most. But this pain will be passed on to the workers and the taxpayer. The emergency support measures to address the gas price crisis when Russia invaded Ukraine cost the UK taxpayer over £51bn, debt that continues to weigh on the budget today.

Which is not to say that the UK energy system is fragile. During the wargaming exercise that fed into the RenewableUK energy security paper, it became very clear that the UK energy system is very hard to break. Like a well-oiled machine, in the event of a crisis, clear roles and proven procedures kick in to ensure that natural gas supply is secured from global energy markets with oil and gas industry leadership playing important roles and working with National Gas and the UK government during these events. We see this today with Norway maximising its gas production capacity to support the UK and Europe. The UK government has been clear – the UK does not have a physical natural gas supply issue. The challenge is a price crisis. The UK can no longer afford this ‘one dimensional’ approach.

With Clean Power 2030, the UK is building a distributed electricity system that can be leveraged much more for energy (and national) security. In the war game exercise, it became clear that an attack on even the largest wind farm can be absorbed much more easily by the UK’s electricity system than one on gas infrastructure. Additionally, wind farms can be more resilient to attacks. The paper includes a telling quote from the Chief Sustainability Officer of Ukrainian electricity developer and utility DTEK: ‘You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm as you would with one missile at a thermal power plant.’ This is a key advantage to a distributed infrastructure – there are fewer single points of failure (such as the Strait of Hormuz).

But perhaps the most important message of the RenewableUK energy security paper is its call to action to the renewables and electricity infrastructure leadership to play a more active role in energy (and national) security.

I was a member of the US National Petroleum Council (NPC) when Russia invaded Ukraine. At the end of July 2022, then US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm went to the NPC and asked the oil and gas industry for recommendations on how to decrease the prices at the pump caused by the Russian invasion (in 30 and 120-day timelines). The oil and gas industry mobilised and delivered. Born from decades of experience in energy crises, similar expertise was on hand from the oil and gas leadership in the room during the war game exercise which I witnessed that fed into this paper.

On the other hand, as the paper points out, we do not have clear emergency procedures for renewables assets and, possibly even more importantly, we have not explored with renewables and electricity infrastructure leadership how the system we are building can be used to improve energy security and resiliency. In times of system stress, how can renewable generators respond to support energy security?

The paper explains how DTEK has reconfigured its electricity system from one once reliant on thermal power to an electricity system where wind, solar and batteries are the workhorse. DTEK is a distribution network operator (DNO), like UK Power Networks, National Grid, SP Electricity North West, Northern Powergrid, SP Energy Networks, Scottish & Southern in the UK. Closest to the consumer during a crisis, the DNOs can also play a much bigger role in improving local resilience given the distributed and digital nature of wind, solar, batteries and microgrids. On that point, in the US, rural cooperatives (member-owned non-profit DNO equivalent in rural America) which have experienced being cut off from gas supply during cold winters and which are facing wildfire risks, are building microgrids to provide autonomous power to communities during extreme weather or disasters.

The RenewableUK energy security paper, New threats and new tools: reinventing energy security for an era of instability, clearly flags that we cannot afford our current approach and also highlights the opportunity we have if we lean into the distributed renewables system we are building, including practical suggestions being deployed in other markets. It’s an important call to action.  

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘How Ukraine’s wartime experiences are being used to guide new strategies for energy resilience’. The resilience of Ukraine's energy sector in war provides a model for international energy security, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.
• ‘The new energy trilemma – why national security is reshaping the global energy transition’. Discover how energy systems are no longer viewed simply as economic infrastructure but are increasingly understood as strategic national assets – critical to economic resilience, industrial competitiveness and national security.