Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity since 2019 and enjoys some of Europe’s cheapest power.MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP/Getty Images
Chris Gay is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is a former Wall Street Journal staffer and writes the newsletter Figure at Center.
If there’s a silver lining in the Strait of Hormuz impasse, it may be the refutation of Donald Trump’s green derangement syndrome and the delicious irony now on display: The renewable-energy sources he despises seem to be mitigating the disastrous consequences of the conflict he foolishly started.
Mr. Trump’s reckless war initially prompted predictions that the benchmark Brent crude price would spike from around US$72 a barrel on the eve of the war to perhaps US$200. Instead, it peaked at about US$120 in April, and has fallen sharply amid an on-off ceasefire. (While high, adjusted for inflation that figure is more than 40 per cent below the record price set in 2008, according to the Energy Institute, a research group affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.)
Part of the explanation is drawdowns from reserves and substitution with fossil-fuel alternatives, the International Monetary Fund reports. Among those alternatives are the renewable sources that Mr. Trump ridicules.
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But economies more reliant on renewables seem to have suffered less than those more dependent on fossil fuels. Installed renewables helped the world avoid US$480-billion in fossil-fuel costs last year, the International Renewable Energy Agency says. The European Environment Agency reported last month that gas-price volatility in early 2026 cost the European Union €13-billion ($20.9-billion) by mid-April, while renewables saved €29-billion, “confirming renewables’ role as the system’s most effective shock absorber.”
There’s a simple reason: Energy from renewables is generally insulated from price shocks. Green technologies have huge installation costs but trivial production costs. Moreover, renewable energy is produced domestically, free from the caprices of foreign markets.
Indeed, a 2022 IMF report found that wholesale electricity prices in Europe fall by an average of 0.6 per cent for each percentage-point increase in the share of renewables in electricity production.
An Oxford Economics report this year suggests how much buffer renewables can provide. In a scenario using South Korea as an example, a higher share of renewables under a given commodity-price shock produces a smaller impact on electricity prices as well as a smaller contraction in GDP. The report concedes that scale matters: Renewable capacity must be high (the Korean scenario posits 50 per cent of national power production, compared with 10 per cent in 2025), and must be accompanied by high electrification rates for transport and household consumption.
Mr. Trump, who has famously proclaimed his love of “beautiful clean coal,” may be tempted to gloat that South Korea and other countries have relaxed restrictions on coal generation. He probably wouldn’t notice or care that they feel forced to do so because of an energy crisis he instigated.
As Oxford notes, renewables are not only cheaper and often cleaner, but “are better aligned with [the] long-term direction of energy markets and policy, making them the more future-proof choice.”
Governments not headed by Donald Trump tend to recognize this. Spain since 2019 has doubled its wind and solar capacity; it now generates about 75 per cent of its power from clean sources, according to non-profit think tank Ember. It enjoys some of Europe’s cheapest power.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told a European Council summit in March that Spanish consumers were paying €14 a megawatt-hour, while Italian, German and French consumers were paying more than €100, “because this government has spent the last eight years working to be at the forefront of renewable-energy deployment.”
Jan Rosenow, professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, wrote in a May report that “Spain did not just add renewables on top of a fossil base. It substituted.”
Uruguay, to cite another example, has since 2005 implemented an ambitious plan to reduce reliance on oil and gas imports. Today, renewables – wind, solar, hydropower and biofuels – account for virtually all of its electricity.
“During the energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine, Uruguay energy prices remained stable,” Rana Adib, executive secretary of the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, told German news network DW in March. “This is extremely important because it means that the inflation does not hit this country in the same way as a country that has a high dependence on fossil-fuel imports.”
Nothing will alter a mind that thinks climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and that wind turbines are “so pathetic.”
But it may not matter. Mr. Trump will be gone within 30 months. He’ll leave behind a smouldering heap of ethical and economic wreckage, but if his Hormuz debacle spurs progress toward cleaner energy, he will have done the world some good, if only inadvertently.