extremis

The world seems to be burning from all sides and global logistics has gone into panic. We had been holding our breath for weeks before the Third Gulf War, the fear of a crisis identical to that of 2022 has materialized in tangible disasters: airlines like Lufthansa they had to cancel up to 20,000 flights for this summer due to the shortage and extreme rise in aviation fuel prices (jet fuel). However, in the midst of this oil cataclysm, something counterintuitive is happening that defies all predictions. As the expert Javier Blas sharply points out In his recent opinion column for Bloomberg“despite the oil shock due to the Iran war, Europe’s electricity markets are calm.” This is the great anomaly of 2026. Breaking down the phenomenon To understand the miracle, you must first understand the threat. In a normal scenario, the logistical shock that means that 20% of the entire planet’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) cannot pass through the Strait of Hormuz should have shredded European domestic economies. The contagion mechanism has a clear theoretical culprit: the marginalist system of the electricity market. In this model, the most expensive technology that comes in to cover demand (historically, gas) is the one that sets the final price of all electricity. Therefore, if the missiles in Qatar make global gas more expensive, the electricity bill in Madrid, Paris or Berlin should be through the roof. But surprisingly, this time the drive belt has broken. The invisible shield The backbone of this European resistance focuses on what energy analyst Javier Blas defines it as a miscalculation: many continue to look at the market “through a filter focused only on oil that belongs to a bygone era”, when today electricity is the true pulse of the economy. The current shielding is the result of a conjunction of factors that act as a providential recovery. First, the rescue in extremis of French nuclear energy. If in 2022 the French country had dozens of reactors stopped due to cracks and was operating at 30-year lows (less than 21 gigawatts), Today it is injecting between 45 and 55 GWproviding a vital energy base not only for France, but for its neighbors, including Germany. Added to this is the end of the drought. The heavy rains in southern Europe and normal rainfall in the rest of the continent has revived hydropower, the EU’s fourth largest source. But the real protagonist is someone else. Solar energy is breaking records, sinking short-term prices to negative levels on weekends in Germany, or to just 18 cents in Spain. In fact, the “fiscal shield” of the Spanish Government, together with the record deployment of 30 GW of solar and wind energy since 2022, have managed to sink the wholesale market to a low €41.5/MWh, allowing the regulated rate to drop by almost 5% year-on-year. The final piece of this puzzle is provided by a report from the IRENA agency: the miracle of batteries. Its cost has plummeted by 93% since 2010. Today, the combination of solar and wind farms with batteries is already capable of offering uninterrupted electricity at prices that compete head-on with Chinese coal or new global gas plants. The cracks in the shield. Despite this triumphalism, European armor is not titanium; It has significant cracks. Although Javier Blas emphasizes that the post-2022 investments in the electricity grid are bearing fruit, the system hangs by a thread every day when the clock strikes eight in the afternoon. Our “Spanish green shield” has a blind spot: the sunset. As the sun disappears, and as there is still no massive deployment of batteries nationwide, the gas combined cycles have to be turned on to sustain the network, returning tension to prices (with nighttime peaks that in March reached €247/MWh). Furthermore, experts agree that the hydroelectric mattress It will evaporate with the heat of the imminent summer. To this we must add that the French nuclear “miracle” hides some worrying fine print. France has broken its historical record by exporting 92.3 TWh, but it has done so, in part, because its internal consumption is stagnant and they continue to lag enormously behind in electrification. Worse still, in its eagerness to protect the profitability of its pharaonic atomic industry, the Elysée acts as a protective wall: it deliberately blocks interconnections with the Iberian Peninsula to prevent hyper-cheap Spanish solar energy from flooding Europe. Finally, structural problems plague the entire continent. According to platform data Earth40% of European transmission lines are more than 40 years old. They were designed for large fossil plants, not to integrate millions of solar rooftops. Without urgent modernization, the network could become our biggest Achilles heel. The new security doctrine. What this Third Gulf War makes clear is that the ecological transition has mutated. It is no longer a mere question of saving the planet; It is a matter of geopolitical survival. Renewables are being explicitly redefined as “weapons of energy security.” The figures speak for themselves: in the first weeks of the war in Iran alone, the European solar fleet saved more than 110 million euros per day in imported gas costs. This is why the European climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, insists in statements to Euronews that Europe must be “more radical”. This involves accelerating electrification using heat pumps and betting on deep geothermal energy, capable of replacing up to 42% of current fossil generation operating 24 hours a day. War as a catalyst. As Blaise’s central thesis concludesEurope is resisting what many call the worst energy shock in history with an electrical fortitude that was unthinkable four years ago. However, catalysts alone do not guarantee results. Inflation and interest rate increases derived from this same war threaten to make more expensive financing future clean infrastructure. It is clear that we have bought a valuable truce thanks to the rain, the efforts of French nuclear power and the sweat of solar panels. This crisis has impressed upon us a definitive lesson: always It will be infinitely … Read more