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Russian’s invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves across the Europe. The energy sector found itself fighting a war it hadn’t prepared for; and scrambled to rewrite decades of assumptions about what “security” actually means.
During our recent webinar “Securing the future of European energy”, our speakers discussed the immediate impact on the energy system. The first is a series of webinars promoting Future of Utilities’ Energy Transition Summit, taking place in Amsterdam on March 18-19 2026, the webinar gave a taste of the discussions to come onstage at the upcoming event. “Before that, we may have ignored or played down the importance of security of supply,” Sven Bontenbal, Director of Strategy at Vattenfall divulged. “This turned our world upside down.”
But Ukraine did more than expose Europe’s dangerous dependence on Russian energy. It revealed something more profound: the old rules of the energy game no longer apply.
For years, energy planners operated under a familiar constraint: the energy trilemma. You could have affordable energy, or reliable energy, or clean energy. But conventional wisdom said you couldn’t have all three.
Ukraine killed that model.
“We have this old energy trilemma. You know, you can’t really have all three of decarbonisation, sovereignty and affordability,” explained Tor Eigil Hodne, SVP European Affairs at Statnett. “But I think in this situation today, you need all three. So it’s moving from an energy trilemma to actually an energy triangle.”
While a trilemma implies compromise, a triangle recognizes interdependence. In the new reality, these three priorities don’t compete, they reinforce each other.
We polled our audience on Europe’s underlying energy priorities during the webinar, and respondents split their votes almost evenly: 38% chose reliability, 24% decarbonisation, 17% sovereignty, and 22% affordability. To our audience, all four dimensions now matter simultaneously.
“I think the poll results actually quite nicely reflect the dilemma that we face in the European Union,” Bontenbal observed. “There is no option, at least in my opinion, not to do one of them.”
The most dramatic shift happened in how Europe thinks about infrastructure itself. Transmission grids, power plants, and substations were once viewed primarily as economic assets. Ukraine transformed them into military targets.
“The electricity grid is somehow turning into a battle zone, as we saw it in Ukraine,” Hodne explained. “In Ukraine, it is about critical infrastructure, and we need to understand that we are part of a total defense concept with new alliances and new cooperation possibilities.”
But the threat extended far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Europe quickly discovered it was vulnerable to the same hybrid warfare tactics: cyberattacks, physical sabotage, and information campaigns targeting energy systems.
“We have a concrete example in West Norway last April, of a hydro power plant that was for four hours taken over, and our police authorities identified the Russians to be behind that,” Hodne recalled. “Fortunately, no huge damage was done because the dam level was so low. But the fact that this was possible to happen just shows that there’s a whole lot of combination in these gray zones.”
“The more connected we are, and we have to be more connected to make it affordable, to make it green, make it secure, the much more connected we are, you know, the more vulnerable we get because of these gray zone cyber security issues,” Hodne noted.
Here, Ukraine’s crisis produced an unexpected answer—one that challenges the supply-side orthodoxy dominating energy policy for decades.
“The EU agreed, by 2022, the reduction, the voluntary reduction of the gas demand by 15% and by January 2025 we have arrived around 17% compared to pre-crisis baseline,” Oikonomou reported. “So that’s big proof that efficiency, energy efficiency savings and demand response can deliver security at scale and very quickly.”
The implications are profound. “For every 1% improvement the EU makes in efficiency, it cuts its gas imports by 2.6%,” Vlasis Oikonomou, Managing Director, Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy and our third participant during our webinar, noted.
This reframes energy security from a supply problem to a demand opportunity. “If a euro is spent on insulating buildings or demand response, which is actually at the heart of the consumer, it can deliver the same security as a euro spent on a new gas asset, sometimes even more depending on where it’s being located,” Oikonomou argued.
The efficiency-first approach also addresses what Oikonomou calls “second order” security concerns: affordability and social cohesion. “If people cannot afford energy, then the system is not secure,” he emphasized. “So energy poverty should not be considered as a social policy side issue, but as a core energy security risk.”
“If we only subsidise bills without fixing inefficient housing, actually, it’s like we’re pouring water into a leaking bucket,” Oikonomou said.
Deep building renovations, heat pump installations, and improved district heating simultaneously reduce import dependence, lower consumer costs, and cut emissions. It’s the closest thing to a free lunch in energy policy, yet it remains chronically underfunded compared to supply-side infrastructure.
While demand reduction bought Europe crucial breathing room, the continent still faces tough choices about its future energy mix. The temptation to simply replace one dependency (Russian gas) with another (LNG imports or Chinese clean technology) looms large.
“We are cursed in a way that we’re always interdependent,” Oikonomou acknowledged. Still, “to import less energy overall is fully realistic, and that’s exactly where efficiency and electrification come in.”
Bontenbal raised similar concerns about the clean energy transition itself: “The moment that we replace fossil fuels by, for example, fossil free electricity, we’re also creating new dependencies, for example, on rare earth metals, etc.”
The key insight: there’s no such thing as true energy independence for a resource-poor continent. But there’s a world of difference between dependencies you choose strategically and dependencies imposed through historical accident or complacency.
If there’s a consensus emerging from post-Ukraine energy policy, it’s this: half-measures don’t work anymore.
“A competitive Europe is a decarbonised Europe, so let’s get cracking,” Bontenbal declared.
The transition must be designed for resilience from the ground up. “This modernisation, it needs to include security issues,” Hodne emphasized. “We need to embed security in that build out and upgrade of the grid. It’s much more expensive, it’s much more difficult and time consuming to do it afterwards.”
That means hardening infrastructure against physical and cyber attacks. It means designing systems that can operate in “island mode” when broader networks fail. It means building excess capacity—redundancy—even though it appears economically inefficient in normal times.
Most importantly, it means getting the public on board. “The public acceptance, or maybe even more public engagement in this process, is crucial,” Hodne stressed. “Because that has been a big problem for many of us TSOs, that things are being blocked.”
Ukraine offers a final lesson here: nothing builds public engagement like shared existential threat. Ukrainians embraced blackouts, rationing, and distributed generation because the alternative was losing their country. Europe won’t likely face such stark choices.
But the choices it does face—between cheap energy and clean energy, between sovereignty and interdependence, between concentrated efficiency and distributed resilience—are still existential. Just on a longer timeline.
The question is whether Europe will make those choices deliberately, based on Ukraine’s lessons, or whether it will wait for the next crisis to choose for it.
These complex trade-offs between reliability, decarbonization, sovereignty and affordability will take center stage at the Energy Transition Summit, March 18-19, 2026 in Amsterdam, where industry leaders, policymakers, and innovators will debate the pathways to Europe’s energy future.
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