Electrification Changes What Energy Security Means

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For most of the fossil-fuel era, energy security meant securing a continuous flow of things that disappeared when they were used. Oil arrived in tankers, natural gas crossed pipelines or oceans as LNG, and coal moved by rail and ship. Burn the fuel and another shipment had to follow, which made access to producing countries, sea lanes, pipelines and foreign exchange central to keeping an economy running.

Electrification changes that relationship because much more international trade moves productive equipment rather than continuously consumed fuel. A country can import solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, transformers and power electronics, then use those assets for years while drawing increasing amounts of energy from domestic sunlight, wind, hydro or other electricity sources. The supply chains remain international, but the economic dependency is structurally different.

That is the central argument in my updated TFIE Strategy Briefing on globalization, electrification and energy security. It also corrects something I got wrong when I first made the sustainability case for globalization in 2021.

At the time, I argued that expanding trade and economic integration would spread technology, increase productivity and create a useful side effect of greater peace. Russia invaded Ukraine less than six months later. The pandemic had already exposed brittle supply chains, and the following years brought export controls, strategic industrial subsidies and increasingly overt economic confrontation between the United States and China.

Trade did not abolish geopolitics, and concentrated dependence can create serious vulnerabilities. Relying heavily on one unreliable supplier for a commodity that must be purchased every month is particularly dangerous. A system with several suppliers, multiple routes, domestic alternatives and enough redundancy to tolerate disruption has a very different risk profile.

Energy provides unusually clear examples of that distinction. Europe responded to the Russian gas shock partly by diversifying fossil-fuel supply, but it has not tried to turn every country into an electrical island. Cross-border electricity infrastructure is being expanded because access to several neighbouring systems can improve resilience alongside domestic generation, storage and flexible demand.

Ukraine provides the harder version of that argument. Ukraine and Moldova synchronized with the Continental European power system shortly after Russia’s 2022 invasion, giving Ukraine access to another source of system support while domestic energy infrastructure was under attack. Interconnection did not eliminate vulnerability, but it expanded the resources available when parts of the national system failed.

The trade shift becomes even clearer in countries that import large amounts of fuel. Pakistan has rapidly installed decentralized solar, with its central bank estimating roughly 50 GW of capacity by the end of 2025. The State Bank of Pakistan estimates that reduced energy imports saved about $7.1 billion in foreign exchange over six years and that the installed solar base could cut the country’s 2026 energy-import bill by another $5.2 billion to $7.8 billion.

Pakistan imported much of the solar hardware, including large quantities from China. That did not eliminate international dependence, but the imported panels now produce electricity from Pakistani sunlight instead of requiring another imported fuel shipment every time electricity is generated. The central bank’s analysis suggests that cumulative savings on fuel imports have already broadly offset the foreign-exchange cost of the imported panels.

Electric vehicles create a similar shift. The International Energy Agency estimates that the global EV fleet displaced about 1.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2025, with China accounting for roughly one million barrels per day. An oil-importing country can still import the car and battery, but it does not then have to import petroleum for every kilometre the vehicle travels.

This distinction is particularly important for emerging economies, where imported fuels can consume scarce foreign currency. Ethiopia explicitly linked its restrictions on new combustion-vehicle imports to reducing fuel dependence as it encouraged electric mobility. Charging infrastructure and vehicle maintenance remain real constraints, but every EV supplied increasingly from domestic electricity changes the future import requirement.

Africa illustrates why imported clean technologies can also become the first stage of industrial development rather than evidence of permanent dependence. Sustainable Energy for All estimates that African countries imported more than $12 billion of solar modules, lithium-ion batteries and assembled EVs between 2022 and 2024. China supplied more than 90% of the solar modules, which is clearly a concentration risk, but the equipment is also creating customers, installers, financing capabilities, maintenance businesses and electricity demand.

Those markets can reinforce one another. Solar and batteries can replace diesel generation at mines, farms, telecom sites and commercial facilities, while electric motorcycles and buses create additional demand for locally generated electricity. Better utilization improves the economics of generation and storage, and larger markets can eventually support local assembly, components, logistics and manufacturing where the scale is sufficient.

That sequence matters. Requiring every country to reproduce every stage of a solar, battery or EV supply chain before allowing deployment would sacrifice much of the manufacturing scale that made the technologies affordable in the first place. Resilience is better served by diversifying excessive concentrations, building selected domestic capabilities and maintaining alternative suppliers and routes than by trying to make every country self-sufficient.

The old fossil-energy system was international too, but its dependencies were unusually persistent. Geological resources were concentrated in particular places, and importing countries had to return to the market continuously because the commodity disappeared through combustion. Electrified systems still require international trade, but a growing share of that trade leaves behind equipment that keeps producing useful services after the transaction.

This is why sustainability and globalization remain linked even after the geopolitical optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has faded. Renewable resources, mineral deposits, manufacturing centres, engineering expertise, capital and demand are distributed unevenly across the world. Trying to force all of them inside national borders would make the transition slower and more expensive.

The better objective is strategic interdependence: several suppliers rather than one, several routes rather than one chokepoint, enough domestic capability to absorb shocks, stronger grids and storage, and much less reliance on imported fuels that have to be purchased again every time they are burned.

The full TFIE Strategy Briefing examines that shift through European electricity interconnection, Ukraine, Pakistan, EV oil displacement and Africa’s emerging solar-battery-electric mobility flywheel.