The Strait of Hormuz crisis and the collapse of green energy fantasies
By isabelle // 2026-07-03
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  • Strait of Hormuz conflict exposed the failure of renewable energy as the global economy remains dependent on fossil fuels for 79 percent of energy consumption
  • Levelized Cost of Energy metric misleadingly ignores the intermittency and hidden costs of solar and wind energy
  • Spain’s 2025 blackout, which has been linked to a solar-heavy grid lacking inertia, shows renewable reliability failures
  • China controls over 80 percent of solar panel manufacturing and most critical mineral refining, creating a worse dependency than oil
  • Voters are rejecting climate policies that raise energy bills without addressing real-world energy needs
The Iran conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz has done what no policy paper or climate summit could: It has ripped the mask off the renewable energy delusion. Energy analyst Tilak Doshi argues that the resulting fossil fuel supply shock — jet fuel up more than 50 percent, diesel costs skyrocketing — exposes the folly of doubling down on wind and solar when the global economy still runs on oil, gas, and coal. The question is whether the climate establishment will admit that electricity is only about 21 percent of global final energy consumption, while the other 79 percent comes from fossil fuel combustion in transport, industrial heat, agriculture, shipping, and aviation.

Why LCOE figures mislead everyone

The claim that renewables are cheaper rests almost entirely on the Levelized Cost of Energy metric favored by the financial firm Lazard. But Lazard itself concedes the metric "does not consider the intermittent nature of selected renewable energy technologies or the related grid impacts of incremental renewable energy deployment." The economist Paul Joskow made a related point in 2011: measuring intermittent and dispatchable power by the same yardstick is misleading, because it hides when each source actually delivers and how much that power is worth at a given hour. The costs left out are real ones: standby plants for when the wind dies, second-by-second balancing, long lines to remote sites, payments for power the grid cannot use, and the subsidies propping up the whole enterprise.

Spain's blackout and Queensland's stubborn reliance on coal

The American Prospect recently called Spain a solar success story. That looks unfortunate given April 28, 2025, when the Iberian Peninsula suffered a cascading failure that lost roughly 15 gigawatts and blacked out tens of millions. The ENTSO-E expert panel traced the collapse to a grid too light on inertia to steady itself — a weakness Doshi attributes to solar supplying close to 60 percent of generation when the system faltered. Conventional spinning generators lend the grid a flywheel effect that smooths sudden jolts in frequency. Solar inverters supply no such ballast. Queensland tells a similar story. Doshi cites the Queensland Audit Office's December 2025 report as finding coal still supplying about 63 percent of the state's electricity in 2024-25. The government's October 2025 Energy Roadmap says that "coal will operate to underpin affordable and reliable energy supply for as long as needed." By Doshi's account, retail power bills rose 34 percent from 2022 to 2025 even as renewable capacity grew.

China controls the supply chain greens ignore

The argument that fossil fuels are geopolitically vulnerable while renewables offer security is perhaps the most dishonest. The IEA confirms China controls more than 80 percent of every manufacturing stage of solar panels. Beyond panels, Beijing dominates the refining of the critical minerals the transition depends on, leading production of 19 of the 20 that matter most and handling the overwhelming share of the world's rare earth, lithium, and cobalt processing. It has already choked off exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and a slate of heavy rare earths to the United States. Against a diversified global oil market with many producers, the renewable supply chain is a far more concentrated dependency.

Why voters grasp what the climate establishment won't

The lesson of Hormuz is that energy security is not just a story about the electricity grid. Yet every crisis brings the same script: more advocacy, more subsidies, more scolding. None of it changes the physics. No jetliner crosses the Atlantic on sunshine, and no one runs a blast furnace or cement kiln on wind at the scale industry demands. The moderate Democrats backing away from aggressive climate messaging may not be heroes, but they grasp what working families figured out at the pump long ago: an energy policy that sends bills soaring while ignoring how the economy is actually powered isn't a plan. It's a wish — and voters are done paying for it. Sources for this article include: WattsUpWithThat.com WattsUpWithThat.com WashingtonExaminer.com
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