Hadn’t you heard? I’ve been offered (and accepted) a PhD studentship at Imperial College London!
It’s a fully funded doctorate for a project on Energy Security, Geopolitics, and National Resilience. I’ll be based in the Centre for Environmental Policy, and supervised by Professor Robert Gross, Professor of Energy Policy and Director of the UK Energy Research Centre; and Dr Alex O’Cinneide, CEO of Gore Street Capital, UKERC visiting fellow and chair of the UNICEF Climate Change Committee.
I am, to put it mildly, extremely excited to study something so critical, at such a great uni, with such an impressive supervisory team. Watch this space.
Unlike the way these things usually go, it’s a quick turnaround. I accepted at the end of August and will start on the 28th of September. So if you’re also studying at Imperial, or just working on a similar project, I’d love to talk.
A lot of my time and writing will increasingly revolve around this PhD, so I thought it’d be good to lay out what I’ll be investigating and how I roughly plan to go about it. This is, as I’m told these things always are, subject to change; but below is a brief overview of the proposal that won me the PhD.
The Dependency Paradox
These are tough times to be a middle power, especially one that doesn’t produce its own energy. Multilateral institutions have weakened, alliances are breaking down, and new, potentially hostile great powers have entered the jockeying for global leadership—which, it seems, is set not to produce a new hegemon but rather an endless interregnum. Worse, the ‘energy weapon’ is certifiably back.
In 2022, Russia cut its gas supplies to retaliate against the EU sanctions over its support for Ukraine. In 2025, the United States used the threat of tariffs to browbeat the EU into agreeing to buy $750 billion in LNG by 2028. Then, in 2026, Iran took the nuclear option and closed the Strait of Hormuz, choking off 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies. Later that same year, the Houthis started constricting the Red Sea oil trade—which was meant to alleviate pressure from Hormuz. Energy weaponisation is back, and the world reels.
Energy, especially oil, has always had the potential for weaponisation, but has also been the lifeblood sustaining a globalised, interconnected world order. The old orthodoxy was that energy interdependence was a peace dividend. If we’re all tied together, we’re all in this together. Right? But the breakdown of multilateral rule-making and the emergence of a multipolar world order turned energy interdependence from a source of peace into a weaponisable geoeconomic tool. I recently saw a good metaphor for this in Foreign Affairs: marriage.
“In a marriage that has gone wrong, the ties that bound a couple together in good times—the house, the children, the dog—become the weapons they use to hurt each other in bad times. Likewise, in today’s geopolitics, states are increasingly turning the systems that once connected them—energy routes, semiconductor supply chains, financial infrastructure, shipping lanes—into weapons.”
Many middle powers have long pursued green energy for climate or pollution reasons. Now they are doing it for energy security. If oil and gas are so unreliable, chaotic, and prone to weaponisation (perhaps even inherently so), then the energy transition represents an opportunity to avoid a massive security threat. Wind turbines cannot be shut off by conflicts half a world away. Solar panels are not subject to the whims of the man in the White House. Or so the logic goes.
The EU is “strengthening sovereignty [by] advancing the global clean transition” and, by “reducing exposure to energy market shocks”, is increasing its “strategic autonomy” to act of its own volition, rather than being pushed around by its energy suppliers. The UK has similar, buzzword-laden missives flying out of DESNZ: “The clean power sprint is the national security fight of our time.”
Renewable energy is now the golden child of energy security and sovereignty. Produced on your own soil, immune to supply interruptions, and free from the luck of geology — a truly resilient national energy system, just as interconnection becomes a vulnerability rather than a strength.
But this, I think, is where something of a puzzle emerges. Because the fastest and cheapest route to deploying renewable energy at scale relies on China. Through decades of deliberate industrial strategy, China accounted for 98% of European solar panel imports, 88% of lithium-ion battery imports, and 61% of inverter imports in 2024. It controls over 90% of rare earth refining and magnet production — critical inputs for wind turbines and electric vehicles — and dominates the processing of lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel.
The aforementioned middle powers—those investing in the transition as an energy security measure—have simultaneously identified China as a major strategic threat. Its “unfair” trade practices, an incompatible political system, and growing belligerence and meddling—such as stoking public backlash in the wake of climate disasters, or (potentially) sabotaging the Northvolt factory—are pushing China into the No. 1 threat position across the middle power spectrum, from the EU, Japan, Canada, and beyond.
In disentangling themselves from a structurally vulnerable dependence on fossil fuels, transitioning middle powers might just be diving headlong into a new dependency on China—one with an even more concentrated supplier-buyer relationship. Dependence on singular suppliers has long been the cardinal sin of national energy security studies, but there is a curious blind spot in the literature regarding this in the context of renewable energy.
So what’s going on here? How can energy-dependent middle powers pursue an energy security measure that, at the required pace, deepens their dependence on an energy system they already recognise as a major strategic threat?
That’s the core puzzle I’ll be investigating in my PhD. There are a few potential explanations out there already, but no firm consensus on which one (if any) actually explains this seeming strategic paradox.
It may be that fossil fuel dependency has become so erratic and geopolitically volatile — weaponised by Russia, the United States, and Iran within four years — that even a more concentrated Chinese dependency appears comparatively secure. It may be that physical climate security—pegged by Chatham House as “Europe’s most systemic security risk”—is simply more pressing and grave than the threat posed by China. It may be that two distinct risk perceptions — fossil fuel weaponisation and Chinese strategic threat — are held by different policy communities that are not in meaningful dialogue with one another, producing an institutional blind spot rather than a deliberate strategic calculation. Alternatively, Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay take the stance that the nature of the dependency is just qualitatively different: these systems may depend on a single supplier for hardware and mineral inputs, but their lack of need for a continuous flow of fossil fuels makes them inherently less open to coercion. Others go further: Olivia Lazard argues that this danger isn’t avoidable at all, but constitutive of the transition itself—dependency, weaponisation, industrial decline are inherent parts of the transition, and middle powers have no choice but to walk through this “valley of death” before reaching the other side.
Some thoughts on methodology
So this is the kind of question I’ll be exploring. I plan to reach out to the cohorts in the know—energy security experts, grid operators, economic wonks, climate departments, and national security officials—to understand why this paradox has emerged. At the moment, I plan to use Delphi-method workshops to work through the problems with them and slowly surface differences in reasoning and logic—but methodology is always subject to change in a PhD, so let’s call this a tentative approach.
That said, if you are a member of such a cohort in the know, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to hear what you have to say and your thoughts on this challenge, even if just informally or off the record.
And to everyone else: what’s your take? Why does this paradox exist? Does it? Who would you suggest I speak to and read? And why? I’m genuinely curious to know, and it’s now my job to be professionally curious about such questions!
-Ben Shread-Hewit