What began as a military operation against Iran’s nuclear and command infrastructure escalated within 48 hours into something the International Energy Agency (IEA) would later call the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, eclipsing even the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz – the 33-kilometre chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG normally passes – did what geopolitics rarely manages: it forced nearly every government on earth to rethink, in the space of a few months, how it powers itself.

Six months on, with ceasefires struck, broken and re-struck, the headline numbers have become almost familiar. Brent crude, trading in the low seventies before the war, spiked past USD 120 a barrel within days.

Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex took a direct hit that analysts estimated would need three to five years to repair, sending Asian spot LNG prices up by more than 140% overnight. Petrol pumps from Hanoi to Berlin saw queues not witnessed in a generation.

But the more consequential story is not the spike – spikes fade – it is what governments, companies and households did in response, and how much of that response looks permanent.

A crisis measured in decades, not weeks
Energy analysts have a habit of drawing three-scenario charts for crises like this: quick resolution, prolonged standoff, and full-blown regional war.

What has actually unfolded is messier – a stop-start conflict with ceasefires that hold for weeks before collapsing, as happened again in July when strikes resumed on tankers in the strait.

That unpredictability is itself the lasting economic signal. Markets can price in a war. What they cannot easily price in is a war that keeps almost-ending.

This is precisely why the IEA’s 2026 World Energy Investment report, released in May, reads less like a snapshot of a single bad year and more like a hinge point. Global energy investment is on course to hit USD 3.4 trillion in 2026, and the composition of that spending tells the real story.

Oil investment is set to fall for a third consecutive year, dropping below USD 500 billion, even as crude prices sit well above their pre-war range. That is a striking reversal of how energy shocks used to work. The 1970s oil crises triggered a drilling boom.

This one has done the opposite, because producers no longer believe elevated prices will last long enough to justify decade-long upstream commitments, and because the risk premium attached to Gulf infrastructure has made the region itself a harder place to invest in.

Where the money is going instead is instructive. Natural gas investment is climbing to USD 330 billion, its highest level in a decade, driven overwhelmingly by new liquefied natural gas export terminals in the United States and Qatar – a hedge against exactly the kind of chokepoint vulnerability Hormuz just exposed.

Renewables remain the largest single category of spending, at roughly USD 665 billion, more than half of it in solar. And in a twist that unsettles the clean-energy narrative, coal investment is heading for USD 180 billion, its highest since 2012, as Asian economies squeezed by the oil and gas disruption fall back on the one fuel many of them can produce at home. China alone accounts for close to 70% of that coal spending, even as it simultaneously leads the world in solar deployment.

The lesson governments appear to be drawing from this crisis is not “decarbonise faster” or “drill more,” it is “diversify everything,” reaching for whatever domestic resource is available, renewable or otherwise.

The geography of who pays
Energy shocks have never been distributed evenly, and this one is unusually blunt about who absorbs the pain.

The Gulf states that built their economic models on frictionless Hormuz transit – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar – have seen exports collapse even with alternative pipelines like the East-West Petroline and the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline running near capacity, together offering barely a tenth of what used to move through the strait.

Meanwhile, exporters outside the conflict zone have quietly profited. Analysis comparing shipping data before and after the war found the United States gained roughly USD 50 billion in additional export revenue and Russia more than USD 15 billion, simply by being able to ship oil that Gulf producers could not.

The knock-on effects reach further than fuel bills. Roughly ten million Indians work in the Gulf and send home upwards of USD 40 billion a year – around a third of India’s total remittance inflows – so any prolonged slowdown in Gulf economies lands directly on household incomes thousands of kilometres away.

Fertiliser markets, dependent on natural gas as a feedstock, tightened alongside LNG, prompting warnings from food-policy researchers about a slower-burning threat to crop yields in fertiliser-import-dependent regions well into 2027 and beyond.

And in a detail that says something about how thinly some economies are stretched, small trading states from Djibouti to Vietnam reported the kind of acute fuel shortages and panic buying that oil-rich nations barely noticed.

The unlikely beneficiaries
Every energy shock creates its opportunists, and this one has already reshaped investment maps well beyond the Middle East. Rystad Energy and other consultancies now point to Brazil, Guyana and Suriname as likely beneficiaries of a slower but broader fossil-fuel diversification through the 2030s, as buyers who once defaulted to Gulf crude look for suppliers with less geopolitical baggage.

Brazilian meat and poultry exporters, cut off from their usual direct routes to Gulf buyers, have rerouted through the Red Sea and Suez Canal at higher cost – a small but telling example of how conflict in one region reshapes trade logistics in entirely unrelated industries.

Electric vehicles have had an unexpectedly good war. April 2026 was the strongest month for EV sales in Europe on record, as fuel price volatility pushed consumers toward vehicles insulated from the pump. The United Kingdom saw its highest rate of solar panel installations since 2012 over the same period.

None of this is coincidence: crises that make fossil fuel prices unpredictable tend to make the fixed, known cost of a solar panel or a battery look considerably more attractive, regardless of what a country’s climate policy says on paper.

What actually sticks
The hardest question for anyone trying to write about this conflict’s “long-term effects” while it is still not entirely over is which changes are structural and which are simply crisis reflexes that will unwind the moment the strait reopens for good. Strategic petroleum releases, excise duty cuts, emergency tax credits for fuel-poor households – these belong to the second category. They will fade.

What looks more durable is the shift in how governments think about energy security itself. The IEA’s language is telling: officials now speak of “resilience rather than optimisation” as the organising principle of energy policy. That is a genuine change in worldview, not just a spending line.

Countries that spent the 2010s optimising for the cheapest barrel are now willing to pay a premium for supply they control, whether that means Chinese coal plants staying open longer than planned, new US and Qatari LNG terminals, or European grid investment running 20% higher than a year ago.

The IEA itself notes that nearly three-quarters of 2026’s investment decisions were locked in before the war began, meaning the fuller reckoning – in financing costs, in project pipelines, in where the next generation of energy infrastructure gets built – is still working its way through the system.

If the 1973 oil shock taught the world that energy security and foreign policy were inseparable, and the 2022 Ukraine invasion taught Europe that pipeline dependency was a strategic liability, the 2026 Iran war may end up teaching a subtler lesson: that in an interconnected energy system, the search for security itself becomes destabilising when every country chases it at once.

Six months in, the world is not so much replacing oil as hedging against needing quite so much of it from quite so few places – a shift that will likely outlast the war that triggered it by many year

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The country will boost power capacity to 125-130 gigawatts by 2030 from the existing  from about 54 gigawatts, media reports said. The communist party’s politburo said in a document that the strategy is “aimed at ensuring national energy security, and sufficiently supplying power for fast and sustainable socio-economic development.” 

Vietnam is one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. The country aims to increase its renewable energy capacity to 15 percent by 2030. It is also trying to reduce dependence on coal for electricity production, according to the strategy document. Currently, coal accounts for 38 percent of Vietnam’s capacity. 

With the country’s new energy plan, oil refineries are expected to meet at least 70 percent of demand for refined petroleum products. In addition, the country will develop necessary infrastructure to import 8 billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas every year by 2030. 

Next week, the Vietnam Business Forum will launch the second edition of the Made in Vietnam Energy Plan (MVEP 2.0) to drive investment in clean energy. The report proposes six policy actions to help the country transit toward sustainable energy.

That said, the report also recommends incentives and implementation of regulatory frameworks to boost investment in renewable energy, such as  

such as rooftop solar, battery storage, floating solar and offshore wind projects.

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HI Holdings is a clean energy company located in Cape Town. The company aims to build the 140MW Kangnas wind farm in Northern Cape province and 110MW Perdekraal East Wind Farm in Western Cape.

HI Holdings was established in 2000. 

Media reports said that the financing will take place by means of ‘innovative funding’ established by UK Climate Investment along with HI Holdings. The funding is to bolster Black Economic Empowerment entities, media reports stated. 

Nearly 40 percent of construction, operations and maintenance staff will be employed and trained from local communities for those wind projects — capable of supplying enough clean energy for 200,000 households. It is anticipated to mitigate 844,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

The projects are expected to commence commercial operations by the end of 2020. That said, a Kruisvallei hydro project with a capacity of 4MW in Free State province will also reap benefits through ‘critical financing’, according to the official press release. 

UK Climate Investment Managing Director Richard Abel said: “Over 90 percent of electricity generation capacity in South Africa currently relies on fossil fuels. Our partnership with H1 Holdings supports the country’s transition to a new energy mix — promoting cleaner growth in southern Africa’s largest economy whilst stimulating economic development in rural areas and supporting increased BEE participation in the renewables sector.”

Currently, 90 percent of electricity generated from South Africa is dependent on fossil fuels. The partnership is hoped to pave the way for new energy generation capacity in the country. It is UK Climate Investment’s second investment in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Under the terms of the agreement,  the renewable energy fund InvIT will have an initial corpus of $600 million with an option to increase the funds further, Chairman Ajay Piramal said in a statement. CPPIB will contribute $360 million while Piramal will finance $90 million to the renewable energy investment trust corpus.

Both companies being the co-sponsors of renewable energy investment trust will cumulatively hold 75 percent of the units. Of the units, CPPIB and Piramal will hold 60 percent and 15 percent respectively. However, Piramal will be the sole investment manager and project manager for renewable energy investment trust, according to a local media report.

The proposed InvIT might be a great opportunity for both companies in the future. “The renewable energy sector is at an inflection point and is witnessing significant consolidation, the pace of which is likely to increase in the near future. We believe that the timing is therefore opportune for aggregating assets in this sector given that the existing players are willing sellers in light of a constrained capital market environment – both debt and equity,” Piramal said.

Headquartered in Toronto, CPPIB is Canada’s largest pension fund with $368.5 billion in assets under management.

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This is the first Climate Bond certified infrastructure-focused green bond to be publicly listed in Southeast Asia. The five-year green bond is listed on the Singapore Exchange.

The proceeds from the AC Energy green bonds will be used to finance the company’s plans for up to 5GW of renewable energy projects in East Asia and Pacific to 2025, with IFC’s subscription dedicated to selected solar PV and wind projects in Vietnam. This builds on IFC’s investment in the power sector in Vietnam, particularly its equity stake in Gia Lai Electricity Joint Stock Company, the developer of the first operational utility-scale solar PV projects in the country.

The investment will also support AC Energy’s strategy to transform the company into a regional player focused on renewable energy, beyond its home market in the Philippines.

“We are delighted to partner with a global player like IFC as we take a major step to grow our renewable energy investments. IFC’s anchor investment and extensive experience in greenbonds were key in successfully mobilizing substantial international and Philippine investment in AC Energy’s maiden capital market offering,” said Eric T. Francia, AC Energy President and CEO.

AC Energy’s parent company, Ayala Corporation, is a strategic client of IFC in Asia and a regional and global leader in the corporate pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a founding member of the UN Global Compact Network in the Philippines.

Vivek Pathak, IFC Director for East Asia and the Pacific, said: “This partnership, leveraging IFC’s extensive global experience in green bonds, demonstrates the tremendous potential of thegreen bond asset class as a tool for mobilizing international institutional capital into infrastructure assets.” He added, “We look forward to expanding our support of such issuances across Asia, advancing the integration of regional power and financial markets.”

The investment is in line with IFC’s commitment to grow green capital markets, including infrastructure-targeted green bonds, essential for funding the region’s massive infrastructure needs.IFC has helped catalyze the green bond market since 2010 and to date has issued 133 green bonds for $8.8 billion in 16 currencies including the Philippine Peso Mabuhay green bond and Indonesian Rupiah Komodo green bond. IFC also helps financial intermediaries issue their own green bonds, as an anchor investor, such as in the Philippines’ BDO Unibank and China Bank, Thailand’s TMB Bank and Indonesia’s Bank OCBC NISP.

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