BY FRANK DALENE
In my last article, I wrote about how the war in Iran emphasizes the importance of energy independence—a country’s ability to produce multiple types of energy, including energy storage to have energy available to its people even if one or more types of energy becomes unavailable, thereby increasing the country’s energy resilience.
As the war continues, strangling the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz, China has emerged as a powerful example of energy independence—and how energy independence really means energy security, even when the world is in turmoil. As The New York Times reports, “China has stockpiled increasingly large amounts of oil. It has pursued renewable sources of energy like solar, wind and hydropower so aggressively that its demand for refined oil, diesel and gasoline is falling. And it has harnessed technology to reduce its reliance on the foreign-sourced raw materials that go into the massive output of its factories.” As a result, while “the Strait of Hormuz … remains largely shut off, China has so far proved more resilient than much of the rest of the world.” For example, “China can now power many of its cars and trains with electricity, greatly reducing its reliance on oil.”[1]
This did not happen overnight. “Beijing’s top leaders have long been preoccupied with their country’s vulnerability to pressure from the American or Indian navies on their seaborne supply of oil and natural gas from the Middle East,” The New York Times reports. “The country’s programs to develop solar and wind power and electric cars as alternatives to oil all moved into high gear 20 years ago.” Meanwhile, “China’s expansion of strategic stockpiles of fossil fuels is more recent, an effort pushed by its top leader, Xi Jinping. … In a speech in 2022, he called for China to ‘enhance coal, oil and gas storage capacity, promote the large-scale application of advanced energy storage technologies, and improve the capacity for self-sufficient energy supply.’”[2]
As a result of this long-term, concerted effort, “The country generates only 4 percent of its electricity from natural gas, and can easily replace that with coal and, to some extent, renewable energy. Within days of the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest official, called for the country to ‘create a safe, reliable, green, low-carbon, resilient, intelligent and flexible new power grid,’ according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of China’s Communist Party.”[3]
Indeed, China is already miles ahead of the rest of the world in terms of renewable energy planning. As of July 2025, China accounted for 29% of all planned wind and solar projects and 74% of projects under construction, as reported by Global Energy Monitor. Additionally, “In Q1 2025, China’s wind and solar capacity surpassed its thermal (coal and gas) capacity for the first time, supplying nearly 23% of the country’s total electricity consumed, up from roughly 18% in Q1 of 2024, according to the National Energy Administration (NEA). Increased output from solar, wind, and other non-fossil energy also met China’s additional electricity demands in Q1 2025. China’s solar and wind operating capacity has soared to 1.4 TW and now accounts for 44% of the world’s operating utility-scale solar and wind capacity, more than the combined total of the European Union, United States, and India.”[4]
While “China is still the world’s largest buyer of oil and gas, and three-quarters of its oil is imported … after billions of dollars in direct subsidies to electric vehicle makers and hundreds of billions invested in renewable sources of energy, China’s efforts have paid off. Demand for refined oil, gasoline and diesel has fallen two years in a row.”[5]
The war in Iran shown us once again how volatile oil costs can be. The cost of renewable energy, meanwhile, remains the same—because the energy from the wind is free and energy from the sun is free. Even regardless of world events, that is something we can never say about oil or gas, because there is always a cost involved in bringing it out of the ground, refining it, and distributing it.
But renewable energy doesn’t only contribute to cost stability and security. South Fork Wind, the first grid size offshore wind farm that is operational, has a 20-year fixed price per kWh contract with LIPA, eliminating the volatility of price and availability of oil and gas we are seeing today—but that’s not all. It also hardens our grid making it more resilient by bringing in energy from a different source and direction. This was put to the test this past winter. Even during the severe blizzards we had, with sustained winds clocking in at 60 miles per hour with 88 mile-per-hour gusts and 30 inches of very wet, heavy snow, at our house in Wainscott where the South Fork Wind submarine cable lands, we never lost power.
Energy security means being able to rely on your energy sources, no matter what is going on in the world environmentally, politically, or economically. That kind of security and stability can only come from encompassing all kinds of energy—fossil fuels and natural gas, yes, but true resilience, independence, and security can only come if we seek to develop all types of energy, not just oil.
Frank Dalene, an Amazon Best Selling Author in Green Business & Environmental Economics titled, Decarbonize The World: Solving The Climate Crisis While Increasing Profits In Your Business, and Founder of the Hamptons Green Alliance, a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. Learn more at frankdalene.com and hamptonsgreenalliance.org
[1] Alexandra Stevenson and Murphy Zhao, “This Is Not China’s War, but Beijing Started Preparing for It Years Ago,” Business, The New York Times, April 6, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/business/china-oil-shock-iran-war.html.
[2] Keith Bradsher, “How China Built Its Vast Natural Gas Stockpile,” Business, The New York Times, April 8, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/china-natural-gas-reserves-iran-war.html.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Yujia Han et al., China’s Solar and Onshore Wind Capacity Reaches New Heights, While Offshore Wind Shows Promise, July 8, 2025, https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/chinas-solar-and-onshore-wind-capacity-reaches-new-heights-while-offshore-wind-shows-promise/.
[5] Stevenson and Zhao, 2026.