ON THE EVE of the first world war a young Winston Churchill switched the Royal Navy from coal to oil. As Daniel Yergin put it in his book “The Prize”, the reliance on doubtful supplies of oil from Persia rather than Welsh coal turned energy security into a question of national strategy. Churchill responded that “safety and certainty in oil lie in variety, and variety alone.”

The same is true of energy today, but the variety of available sources now extends far beyond oil. Military planners are taking note. Since 2003, when America’s current defence secretary, James Mattis, drew attention to the vulnerabilities in warfare caused by the “tether of fuel”, America’s armed forces have invested in a variety of clean-energy technologies: wind turbines, solar panels and mini-grids are common on military bases. So are experiments. A year-long naval exercise in 2016 involved a strike group powered by a mixture of conventional fuels, nuclear power and biofuels made from beef fat.

Access to abundant energy helps a country fight wars. It also supports peaceful projections of power. This special report has argued that those with the most readily available and reliable sources of energy, and the ability to produce and export new technologies, will be winners as the world reduces its dependence on oil. The losers will be those whose vested interests and lack of alternatives keep them wedded to fossil fuels. But the transition need not be a geopolitical battleground. Two factors could help: better collaboration and greater localisation.

In the energy field, collaboration has deep roots. According to Stephen Cheney, a retired Marine brigadier-general who heads the American Security Project, a think-tank, it emerged after the oil shocks of the 1970s as consuming countries sought a way of jointly ensuring energy security in the face of soaring prices. One result was the creation of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) in 1974, with a broad mandate to work for energy security and co-operation on energy policy among its members, chiefly large energy consumers. In 2001, 28 of the IEA’s members each agreed to establish strategic petroleum reserves, equal to 90 days’ worth of net imports, as a buffer against supply shortages.

Another result was the global oil market, generating price signals that alert consumers to oil shortages and gluts. America and its allies have supported it since the 1970s by helping underwrite the secure flow of oil, keeping sea lanes open and supporting stable regimes (however odious) in the Middle East. This market has now been extended from oil to gas. Trade in liquefied natural gas is growing, and pricing has become more flexible.

The transition to clean energy is partly driven by the need for ever bigger efforts to tackle global warming. Among other things, that means clean energy needs to expand from electricity, which gets most of the attention now, to heating, transport and industrial processes. It involves building a spider’s web of cross-border grids to help offset the variability of sun and wind power. As the transition gathers pace, it may even require support for petro-economies made vulnerable by the switch.

Countries and regions that lack the right climate may need high-voltage transmission lines to feed them clean energy from thousands of miles away. New IEA-type organisations may be required to ensure that such supplies are not “weaponised”. And if the worst happened and climate change proved catastrophic, the world would need to come together to deal with the consequences, such as mass migration and water wars.

Technology is another area of potential collaboration. The best guarantee of this would be free markets. Trade wars and other forms of protectionism stymie innovation. Putting quotas on critical minerals, as China did in 2010, would resemble the worst cartel-like tactics of the oil markets.

International agreements on technology also help. On the sidelines of the Paris accord in 2015, 22 countries and the EU as a block pledged to double their research-and-development funding for clean energy. (Some very rich people, led by Bill Gates, also pledged to spend billions on breakthrough technologies.)

The need for more of this is compelling. In solar energy, for example, 60 years of silicon-cell technology has probably gone as far as it can. Perovskite solar cells, a more recent discovery, already come close to silicon’s performance and may be more efficient. They can be made cheaply and, unlike rigid silicon cells, can be applied to flexible films of plastic. They are close to commercial launch, though durability is still a problem.

Decentralised power

On the eve of the first world war a young Winston Churchill switched the Royal Navy from coal to oil

Localisation is a second way of depoliticising energy. The fossil fuels that powered the 20th century were produced by oligopolies, fed into centralised networks and sold on the premise of scarcity. Supplies were seen as finite. Renewable energy such as solar and wind is abundant but intermittent. Supergrids are one way of overcoming this. Minigrids involving locally produced wind and solar power, electric-vehicle batteries, small-scale hydropower and small modular nuclear reactors may be another. Some of the companies mentioned in this report are working towards such localised solutions, including Envision, a Chinese firm that hopes to create an “operating system” for small-scale producers and users of energy, to help keep supplies stable. It has also invested in Germany’s Sonnen, which sells batteries that become virtual power plants when connected to other households.

If they succeed, local communities, districts and regions may get more say in the energy system, weakening the influence of national utilities, as has happened in Germany’s Energiewende, albeit at wasteful expense. Some of the more energy-secure regions may compete with countries to influence global policies. Leaders from California, New York and other renewable-friendly states in America are trying to help shape global climate talks even as the Trump administration turns away.

Such “energy democratisation” could provide better access to electricity for the 2bn people likely to be added to the global population in the next few decades. It could help decentralise economies and counter the perception that the market works just for the rich and powerful. It could also open up a whole new realm of innovation, just as oil did with motor cars, suburbanisation, air travel, plastics and mass food production in the 20th century. The great game of green energy need not be winner takes all.