Europe has been here before, and it still has not fully learned the lesson.
In 2022, the continent woke up to a harsh reality: decades of dependence on Russian pipeline gas had left it dangerously exposed to the decisions of a single geopolitical actor. Emergency LNG terminals were built at record speed. Promises were made. Strategies were rewritten. Then, gradually, the urgency faded.
On 28 February 2026, it happened again.
Joint US Israeli strikes on Iran triggered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, what the IEA’s Executive Director described as “the greatest global energy security challenge in history,” and the largest supply disruption the global oil market has ever faced. The consequences have been immediate and far reaching. Brent crude rose above $100 per barrel for the first time in four years, peaking at $126. European gas benchmarks nearly doubled to more than €60/MWh by mid March, just as the crisis collided with historically low European storage levels, estimated at only 30% capacity after a harsh winter.
The question is no longer whether Europe needs an energy hedge. The question is where it can find one, and fast.
The same dependency, just a different supplier
After 2022, Europe moved decisively away from Russian gas. To a degree, that worked. The EU cut its dependence on Russian gas from more than 40% in 2021 to 13% in 2025, largely by ramping up US LNG imports, which now account for 27% of European gas supply.
But the deeper structural problem never went away.
As Bruegel noted this month, Europe has not eliminated dependency. It has simply shifted it, replacing one external source with another, especially the United States. The Iran crisis has now exposed the limits of that strategy. European natural gas prices jumped 63% in a single week following Iran’s drone attack on Qatar’s Ras Laffan production facilities, the largest weekly increase since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Parts of the world’s largest LNG plant have been damaged, and QatarEnergy has warned repairs could take up to five years.
Europe is still pricing much of its electricity against the most expensive marginal fuel: gas. That gas is still imported, still traded globally, and still forced through chokepoints Europe does not control.
The countries that are not panicking
What this crisis makes unmistakably clear is something energy models often fail to capture with enough urgency: countries with a high share of domestic renewable generation are simply less exposed.
Power prices in Spain currently range between €37 and €57 per megawatt hour, compared with €113 in Germany and €141 in Italy. The reason is simple. More than 60% of Spain’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Spain is not completely insulated from global markets, but it has broken the most damaging link in the chain. Domestic sun and wind do not get repriced when a missile hits a gas terminal in Qatar.
Fatih Birol put it plainly: “I expect one of the responses to this crisis will be an acceleration of renewables, not only because they are helping to reduce emissions, but also because they are a homegrown domestic energy source.”
Sam Butler Sloss from Ember captured the strategic shift just as clearly: “In the old fossil fuel world, energy security meant diversifying fuel supply. With electrotech, nations now have the tools to increasingly eliminate imported fuels altogether.”
That is the real change. Energy security is no longer only about diversification. It is increasingly about replacement.
Why Romania deserves more attention
Romania rarely dominates Europe’s energy conversation in the way Germany, France, or Spain do. It should.
The country installed 2.2 GW of solar capacity in 2025 alone, marking a third consecutive year of record growth and pushing total installed solar capacity beyond 7 GW. Current projections point to 15.31 GW by 2031, representing a 14.52% CAGR. Romania is already on track to exceed its 10 GW solar target by 2030, with another 2.5 GW expected by the end of 2026.
More importantly, this growth is not speculative.
A €3 billion Contracts for Difference scheme is providing 15 year revenue certainty for utility scale projects. At the same time, corporate PPAs are expanding and supporting merchant plus structures. In the second CfD auction, solar cleared at an average strike price of €40.35/MWh, below today’s European gas benchmark and only a fraction of the cost of gas fired generation under current conditions. Across 2024 and 2025, three CfD auction rounds were completed successfully, awarding contracts for more than 4 GW of total capacity.
Romania also holds a structural advantage that few peers can match.
It sits at the crossroads of Central and Eastern European energy infrastructure. It has some of the strongest solar irradiance in Europe, particularly in its southern and southeastern regions. It has decoupled economic growth from emissions faster than almost any other EU member state. Its move away from coal has also repositioned distribution utilities as active enablers of rooftop solar, while EU Recovery and Resilience Facility grants and Modernisation Fund allocations are helping shorten supply chains and create jobs.
This is not a market searching for a story. It is a market already building the solution before Europe fully understood the scale of the problem.
The lesson history keeps repeating
The 2022 to 2024 energy crisis cost Europe €600 billion in additional energy bills compared with 2021. That figure does not capture the geopolitical cost, the industrial competitiveness lost, or the social strain of households rationing heat through two winters. And by most measures, that crisis was less severe than the one now unfolding.
Europe has made real progress in electricity generation. In 2024, renewables accounted for 47.5% of EU gross electricity consumption. But across the full energy system, renewables still represented only around a quarter of total energy consumed.
That gap matters.
It means Europe is more advanced in power generation than in true energy independence. It also means the window to close that gap at a reasonable cost is narrowing every time another geopolitical shock pushes fossil fuel prices higher.
The investors and businesses that respond during the crisis, rather than after it, will be operating under very different economics from those who wait for the next one.
Momentum Energy’s view
At Momentum Energy, we have spent enough time in Romania’s renewable sector to see both the promise and the friction of this market up close. What the current global crisis confirms is something we have believed for a long time: Romania’s solar buildout is not just a growth story. It is an energy security story for Europe.
The combination of EU backed revenue certainty through CfD contracts, solar costs that now sit structurally below gas fired generation, and a national policy framework targeting 15.31 GW of solar capacity by 2031 meant the fundamentals were already strong before Hormuz. The geopolitical shock has not changed those fundamentals. It has made them impossible to ignore.
For investors assessing capital deployment across Central and Eastern European renewables, Romania offers a rare alignment: a market large enough to absorb meaningful investment, a regulatory structure that supports bankable long term revenues, and a geopolitical context in which the value of domestic clean energy has never been more urgent or more clearly priced.
The hedge Europe needs already exists.
It is being built, today, in Romania.
