The war on Iran has unexpectedly ignited a renewables race, as Europe grapples with the reality of its fossil fuel reliance.
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Oil and gas prices have yo-yoed significantly in recent weeks due to the stranglehold Iran has on the Strait of Hormuz, a 39km passage that carries around 20 per cent of global oil supplies.
Analysts warn that sky-high prices at the pump and on your energy bills won’t immediately snap back – even when the war comes to an finish. This has resulted in a renewables surge, with many Europeans scrambling to purchase green tech like electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps and plug-in solar systems.
While renewables have been touted as the silver bullet to the latest fossil fuel shock, their efficiency is being put to the test by the very problem they’re attempting to prevent: climate alter.
Can renewables survive climate alter?
According to the UN, each increment of global warming results in “rapidly escalating hazards” such as more intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes that increase risks for human health and ecosystems.
Thomas Balogun, a renewables investor, informs Euronews Earth that this has become one of the most “significant operational and strategic challenges” facing renewable energy systems.
“While renewable energy sources are central to reducing our carbon emissions and addressing climate alter, they’re inherently depfinishent on environmental conditions,” he states.
Balogun argues that as weather patterns grow more volatile – as heat-trapping gases continue to drive up temperatures – the reliability, efficiency and resilience of our green energy transition are being pushed to breaking point.
The solar heat ‘paradox’
A new analysis by SolarPower Europe found that harnessing sunlight for energy has saved Europe more than €3 billion in March alone – and could go on to save the continent a staggering €67.5 billion by the finish of the year, if gas prices remain high.
However, 2026 is slated to be among the hottest on record, potentially worsened by forecasts that El Niño could form later in the year. While soaring temperatures may seem like a boost for solar generation, intense heat can actually reduce efficiency while increasing strain on the electricity grid.
“It’s a common misconception that more sun always equals more power,” Ioanna Vergini, founder of wfy24.com, a platform that analyses weather data and climate volatility trfinishs, informs Euronews Earth.
“Photovoltaic (PV) cells are semiconductors, and like all electronics, they lose efficiency as temperature rises.”
For every degree above 25°C, solar panel efficiency drops by about 0.4 to 0.5 per cent.
During the extreme heatwaves that sweltered large parts of Spain and Greece last summer, local solar farms saw “significant output dips” exactly when air-conditioning demand was peaking.
“We tracked instances where surface temperatures on panels hit 65°C, leading to a nearly 20 per cent drop in theoretical capacity,” Vergini states.
Last year, intense heat struck large swathes of Europe – including usually cool Finland, which finishured three straight weeks of 30°C temperatures. Further south, Europeans struggled under temperatures exceeding 40°C, pushing dozens of nations into drought.
Researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine seeed at 754 European cities and found that climate alter was responsible for pushing temperatures up by an average of 3.6°C in summer 2025.
A ‘sweet spot’ for wind turbines
Blustery conditions are ideal for wind energy, and assisted the UK break a new renewable record this year. On 26 March, British wind energy generation hit a new high of 23,880 megawatts, enough power to supply around 23 million homes.
However, when wind speeds receive too strong, the electricity grid is often filled with more green energy than it actually requireds.
According to Octopus Energy, a UK energy firm, this creates “rush hour traffic on the grid” meaning the energy can’t receive to where it’s requireded.
As a result, wind turbines are often turned off (a process known as curtailment) leading to gas plants being paid to switch back on. This cost Britain a staggering £1.47 billion (around €1.78 billion) last year.
In Germany, compensation costs for the curtailment of renewable energy hit €435 million in 2025, while curtailment rates rose to record levels in several EU nations such as Spain and France during the first nine months of last year.
The British government recently unveiled plans to provide homeowners with discounted or free electricity when the grid becomes overwhelmed with green energy to overcome this costly issue.
Strong winds can also force turbines to shut down indepfinishently of government ordered closures.
“Wind turbines have a ‘sweet spot’ – when wind speeds exceed around 90kmh, turbines enter ‘survivability mode’ and feather their blades to a stop to prevent structural failure,” explains Vergini.
During Storm Ciarán in late 2023, high-capacity offshore wind farms in the UK and France had to be shut down despite the ‘perfect’ wind conditions on paper. This led to a sudden reliance on gas peaker plants to fill the gap.
Previously, a wind turbine blade in Australia snapped in half during a storm just six months after it was installed.
It is why around the world, operators are adapting wind turbines to withstand higher wind speeds – particularly in regions prone to hurricanes and tropical cyclones.
In 2023, MingYang Smart Energy installed a “typhoon-resitsant” wind turbine in the South China Sea that it states can survive wind speeds of up to 215km per hour for 10 minutes.
But with climate projections indicating that winter windstorms will increase slightly in number and intensity, many of Europe’s turbines could be at risk of failing.
Is Europe’s ‘hugegest battery’ empty?
Warmer temperatures – fuelled by human-cautilized climate alter – are also impacting hydropower.
Take Norway, for example, which is often touted as Europe’s “hugegest battery” due to its thousands of dams. Following a warm, dry winter, the Nordic nation’s snow reserves have fallen to their lowest levels in two decades.
Experts state this has created a deficit of about 25TWh, around enough energy to power around 2.5 million homes for a year – and almost a fifth of Norway’s total hydropower output last year.
“The low snowpack in Norway this past winter is a good example of a broader shift: hydropower in Europe is becoming more variable,” Alex Truby of Upstream Tech, an AI-driven forecasting model, informs Euronews Earth.
“At the same time, precipitation patterns are shifting. Much of Europe may see more total precipitation, but more of it is falling as rain instead of snow.”
For every 1℃ rise in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold around seven per cent more moisture, which can lead to more intense and heavy rainfall.
While rain provides immediate runoff, snow stores water through the winter and releases it gradually during spring and summer, providing a consistent, predictable supply of water to generate electricity.
Truby argues that to tackle the issue, hydropower plants required to adapt to modifying conditions. This can be done with better seasonal and short-term forecasts, increased storage capacity, and improvements to the grid, which will assist relocate renewable energy across regions to assist smooth out the variability.
Europe’s ‘insufficient’ energy grid
Not only are existing renewables struggling with Europe’s outdated energy grid, but new analysis states more than 120 gigawatts of anticipated green projects are also at risk due to grid constraints.
Energy consider-tank Ember warns that one in every two grid operators has “insufficient grid capacity” to connect upcoming wind and solar projects to the grid, with the most severe constraints found in Austria, Bulgaria, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovakia.
Grid barriers are impacting both large renewable projects and houtilizehold installations, the report warns. Across the 17 countries that report their grid capacity, more than two-thirds of new wind and large-scale solar planned by 2030 are currently at risk.
Insufficient grid capacity could also delay 16GW of rooftop solar installations, impacting more than 1.5 million houtilizeholds across Europe.
The EU estimates that annual investments of around €85 billion in the power grid are necessary between 2031 and 2050.
Last year, the European Commission unveiled its EU Grids Package in response, a €1.2 trillion effort to overhaul the bloc’s electricity system, its network of wires, substations, and technologies that deliver power across the continent.
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