Energy Crisis

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The Power of Tomorrow

In 1973, the oil embargo triggered by the Arab–Israeli war sent shockwaves through the industrialised world. Petrol queues stretched for miles, factories closed, and governments suddenly understood — many for the first time — just how catastrophically dependent their economies had become on a single, finite resource. In the decades that followed, investment in alternative energy surged, only to fall away again as oil prices stabilised and short-term economic thinking reasserted itself. Now, half a century later, the cycle is repeating. Only this time, there is an additional and far more urgent dimension: the planet itself is warming, and the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause.

The good news is that the alternatives have never been better. Solar energy, once dismissed as a niche technology for remote locations without reliable electricity supply, has undergone a transformation so dramatic that analysts frequently struggle to convey its scale. The cost of solar panels has fallen by more than ninety percent since 2010. In large parts of the world, building a new solar farm is now cheaper than running an existing coal power station. This is not a prediction for the future — it is already true today in India, China, the United States, and much of Europe.

Wind power has undergone a comparable revolution, particularly offshore, where turbines can be positioned to capture consistent, powerful winds without the visual and noise concerns that have made some onshore developments controversial. The turbines being installed today are engineering marvels — some have blades longer than a football pitch, capable of powering hundreds of homes from a single rotation. The challenge, as with solar, is that wind is intermittent: it does not blow at the same speed all the time, and electricity is difficult to store at the scale needed to match demand.

This is where hydrogen enters the picture as a genuinely exciting prospect. The basic principle is simple: use surplus electricity from solar and wind to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used as fuel whenever it is needed — in vehicles, in heating systems, or to generate electricity when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Countries with abundant solar and wind resources but small populations — Australia, Chile, Morocco — are already positioning themselves as future hydrogen exporters, much as some of today's oil-exporting nations built their wealth on a single energy resource.

Yet for all the optimism, significant obstacles remain. The efficiency of the hydrogen production process is still relatively low — a considerable proportion of the original solar or wind energy is lost in the conversion. Battery storage technology, while improving rapidly, remains expensive at the scale needed to power cities and industries. And perhaps most critically, the infrastructure required to distribute and use these new energy sources — hydrogen pipelines, charging networks for electric vehicles, smart electricity grids — requires investment on a scale that only governments can mobilise. The market alone will not move fast enough.

What is needed, and what is increasingly being called for by scientists, economists, and even some previously sceptical politicians, is a coordinated global response — something comparable in ambition to the post-war Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe's shattered economies in the late 1940s. The energy transition is not simply a technical challenge. It is a question of political will, international cooperation, and collective imagination. The technology, for the most part, already exists. What remains to be seen is whether humanity can summon the determination to use it in time.