{"id":548815,"date":"2026-03-18T17:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T17:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/548815\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T17:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T17:32:11","slug":"fossil-fuels-no-thanks-why-trumps-iran-war-is-pushing-eu-toward-renewables-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/548815\/","title":{"rendered":"Fossil fuels? No thanks. Why Trump\u2019s Iran war is pushing EU toward renewables. \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBecoming independent of oil and gas is one of the key issues, as is once again evident with the crisis we are facing … due to the conflict in the Middle East,\u201d said German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider on Tuesday, calling for a faster buildout of renewable energy and power grids.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Monday, his Latvian colleague Kaspars Melnis told reporters: \u201cIf you talk about energy prices, what we can do, it’s [producing] more and more our own renewable energy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lesson learned<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s push for more renewables \u2014\u00a0and, in some countries, for nuclear power \u2014\u00a0draws from the lessons of the 2022 crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen talks to the media in the Berlaymont building in Brussels, Belgium on March 18, 2026. | Thierry Monasse\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s important for me to underline that we are in a much better situation in the EU now than we were in \u201822. Why? Because we have more renewables in our system, because we’ve diversified our supply in general in our energy system, because there’s less hours where it’s gas that sets the price for electricity,\u201d said EU energy chief Dan J\u00f8rgensen on Monday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Von der Leyen, in Monday’s letter, noted that the share of renewables in the EU\u2019s electricity mix has surged from 36 percent in 2021 to nearly 50 percent now.<\/p>\n

While costly gas tends to set the overall electricity price in the EU system, the higher the share of clean electricity a country has, the lower their costs. In renewable-powered Spain, research has found<\/a>, energy prices increased far less than in gas-dependent Italy.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBecoming independent of oil and gas is one of the key issues, as is once again evident with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,228339,2490,139872,19161,2572,60635,271519,75,8666,19216,18466,5575,2328,271520,19136,5427,8146,2016,128,2020,5525,1055,22052],"class_list":["post-548815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-dan-jorgensen","tag-donald-trump","tag-donald-tusk","tag-electricity","tag-energy","tag-energy-prices","tag-energy-supply","tag-environment","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-fuels","tag-imports","tag-iran","tag-italy","tag-julian-popov","tag-oil","tag-poland","tag-renewable-energy","tag-russia","tag-science","tag-spain","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states","tag-ursula-von-der-leyen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}