By Güney Yıldız
The most dangerous indicator for Europe's energy security at this time is not the rise in the price of oil – but its fall.
By June 25, with tankers again passing through the Strait of Hormuz and Brent falling below $73 a barrel, the market had almost forgotten the shock. The danger lies right there. Every time the price falls, Europe forgets what the rise was trying to tell it.
That is, that imported energy carries additional costs for budgets. Europe pays twice for security. Once at the port, at the price of each cargo that will be transported by sea. And the second time, after the panic subsides.
Accounting works the other way around. A network, a cable, a battery are listed as a cost, visible, dated, and easy to cut in a tough year. The risk posed by the introduction of fuel through disputed "bottlenecks" is treated as a weather phenomenon, as an external parameter that does not pass on the balance sheet. Thus, the route of imports always seems cheaper. This is a wrong practice both at the measurement level and at the policy level. When Europe costs the transition away from imported fuels, the cost is immediate and appears according to schedule, so the task seems expensive. When it estimates the cost of the model with which it already operates, the costs are indirect. It appears as a geopolitical and political risk, which is not disputed by the indicators. If we put both costing models on the same basis, the comparison overturns the original picture.
The bill that the market never sends
The size of the burden is not speculation. In 2022, the first comprehensive year of the energy war, the EU's energy import bill jumped to close to €604 billion. euros, with the bill for natural gas approaching 400 billion. euros, more than three times compared to 2021. By 2024, the bill had been reduced to about 427 billion. euros. This is the factor that most people overlook. The bad year was not an isolated incident. The bill is structural and is paid every year.
Money does not "disappear". They are spent every year dealing with the problem, rather than solving it once and for all.
Arnoldas Pikzirnis made this comparison to me in Vilnius. He was Lithuania's Deputy Minister of Energy until last year, while before that he worked in the field of national security. "Look at how much extra money European consumers have paid because of Hormuz," he said, "and think about the same amount if it had been invested in European networks: the reality would have been completely different."
When I raised the issue of measurement, he was clear. "Nothing is cheaper," he said. He meant neither in the long term nor as an immediate increase in prices. With the path that Europe is taking, he argued, domestic heating of the type used by Britain will be one of the biggest costs that will burden a society in the next 10-20 years, and not a deferred saving.
Building your own power system doesn't cut dependency. It simply transfers some of the reliance on fossil fuels, batteries, inverters, transformers, financing as well as permits to install any of them on the ground, while many of them continue to pass through China. What changes is the type of dependency. A supply chain can diversify and reshape over the years. A Strait that someone decides to exploit cannot be negotiated suddenly on a winter morning.
Lithuania did the experiment
Lithuania has already paid the price to discover this.
For decades, the Baltic network operated on a Soviet-era system that synchronized through Russia and Belarus. In February 2025, after a decade of work and European funding of over €1.2 billion. euros, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia cut the umbilical cord and synchronized with continental Europe.
In 2022, Lithuania became the first EU member state to stop importing Russian gas, oil and electricity, relying on the Klaipeda LNG terminal it had built in 2014, despite objections that it was too large and expensive. The terminal now supplies neighbouring countries. In retrospect, this costly decision looks like an insurance policy that has been redeemed.
The threat has not disappeared. It was carried under water. Near Christmas 2024, the Estlink 2 cable between Finland and Estonia broke down after a tanker of the Russian "shadow fleet", the Eagle S, dragged its anchor to the bottom. Whether a court ever proves intent is less important than the lesson learned from this incident by all European network operators. It is much cheaper to threaten underwater infrastructure than to repair it.
The bottleneck is the network
Pikzirnis's most perceptive observation was not about the past. Looking ahead, in the next 10-15 years, he said: "The biggest issue we will all face is the network."
Europe has spent three years talking about "molecules": moving away from Russian gas, entering American and Qatari LNG, Norwegian pipelines, Caspian routes. The "points" still count. The most serious limitation now is electrons, the cross-border transfer of electricity and its protection once it begins to be channelled.
There is a date to keep in mind. The Baltic-German PowerLink, an undersea connection with a capacity of about 2 GW between Lithuania, Latvia and Germany, is under consideration by the European Commission, with a decision on the next phase of the project expected by the end of 2026. It's the kind of project that seems expensive as long as Hormuz is open, but it becomes necessary if the Strait closes This time gap is the real enemy. After every crisis, Europe realizes for a while that energy security is something tangible. Then, the price drops and this realization disappears with it.
Pikzirnis has followed this cycle. "Usually the memory of the lessons learned lasts for a year, at most one and a half," he said.
That time is already running. The Strait of Hormuz is reopening, Brent is falling, and the arguments in favour of building projects are being discussed in a low voice.
Forbes
