The energy transition can appear to be in a vastly different state depending where one is sitting.
At the end of January, the US officially withdrew from the Paris climate agreement for the second time – a largely symbolic move given President Donald Trump has already been busy unwinding many of his predecessor’s clean energy initiatives.
Commentators have since been busy speculating over what the withdrawal means for the rest of the world, and whether other countries will follow suit.
More concerning than the Trump administration’s retreat from climate leadership is its attempts to block offshore wind farms even as they approach completion.
Luckily, other governments don’t share this animosity toward wind.
As Trump was preparing to pop the champagne, the UK and nine European governments signed an agreement to work together on 100GW of offshore wind projects in the North Sea, along with interconnectors to link the electricity across a large part of the continent.
UK energy secretary Ed Miliband said of the so-called Hamburg Declaration: “We are standing up for our national interest by driving for clean energy, which can get the UK off the fossil fuel rollercoaster and give us energy sovereignty and abundance.”
The rollercoaster analogy is an apt one.
Rollercoasters are a fun time for children; for grownups, they induce sickness.
Fossil fuels have helped nations to develop and achieve enormous wealth; now, they threaten that wealth through escalating climate emergencies.
Miliband also stated his ambition to “end Europe’s reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets controlled by petrostates and dictators”.
Russia was the EU’s main supplier of fossil fuels prior to its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, after which imports from the US ramped up massively.
Europe is increasingly determined not to simply shift its energy reliance to another petro-power, especially as Trump plays cat and mouse over Greenland.
In this way, geopolitics is helping to drive the global energy transition forward, even as the climate policies of individual nations serve as handbrakes.
It is telling that the governments involved in the Hamburg Declaration are not selling it as a climate initiative, but rather as a form of energy security.
Whatever the reason, the move should come as a boon for investors.
By pursuing a collaborative approach to energy and linking generation across its internal borders, Europe will be able to smooth out some of the intermittency of its renewable sources.
A similar logic is emerging in Southeast Asia, where the long-discussed ASEAN Power Grid is gaining renewed urgency as countries confront their dependence on imports amid increasing demand.
Cross-border transmission will unlock renewable resources where they are most abundant and deliver power where it is most needed at any given time, all while reducing the cost each country would face in attempting to solve the entire challenge alone.
Domestic policies remain a real risk, with Vietnam’s recent power-purchase agreement disputes a case in point.
Uncertainty over contracts and retroactive changes can quickly chill investor appetite, no matter how compelling the underlying demand story is.
But if generation assets are plugged into a broader network rather than a single national offtaker, investments are less exposed to the policy whims of any one government.
Meanwhile, shared grid and generation infrastructure should lead to more coordination and ease of approvals for investors.
In this sense, regionalisation becomes a form of de-risking.
Going forward, the most durable energy transition strategies will seek to circumvent unpredictable domestic policies and lean into the stability of collaborative international infrastructure.