The Geopolitics of the Energy Transition

The ongoing global shift away from fossil fuels toward renewable electricity, electric vehicles, and battery storage is widely described by energy analysts, including the International Energy Agency in its annual World Energy Outlook reports, as a transition from a geopolitics of fuel flows to a geopolitics of technology and mineral supply chains. Where oil and gas geopolitics centered on controlling the flow of an extracted, combusted commodity that must be continuously resupplied, solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are manufactured goods: once built and installed, they require comparatively little ongoing fuel input, shifting the strategic chokepoint from continuous resource extraction toward the manufacturing capacity, technological know-how, and mineral inputs — lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths, discussed earlier in this module — needed to build them in the first place.