As energy becomes a strategic vulnerability rather than an invisible utility, the capacity to store and manage electricity is emerging as a source of economic resilience, technological advantage and geopolitical power. Since the outbreak of the latest war in the Middle East, the market value of China’s leading battery manufacturers has risen by more than $70 billion. Shares in CATL, BYD and Sungrow have outperformed oil majors such as Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, even as oil prices surged. Investors appear to be betting that geopolitical instability will not merely make fossil fuels more expensive, but will accelerate a more fundamental shift towards electrification, renewable energy and storage.
That shift towards storage reaches far beyond the mere production of batteries. Geopolitical tensions, the energy transition and the rise of power-hungry technologies such as AI are combining to place unprecedented pressure on electricity systems. Energy storage is therefore no longer simply a technology that supports renewable energy. It is becoming a core component of the economy and of the wider computational infrastructure on which that economy increasingly depends.
Renewable energy reduces dependence on imported fossil fuels, which improves resilience, but it simultaneaously introduces different challenges. Wind and solar power fluctuate, while households, factories, transport systems and data centres require electricity at specific times and in increasingly large quantities. Storage connects these two temporalities: it captures electricity when supply is abundant and releases it when demand rises or generation falls. This is familiar for quite some time. But what has changed most profoundly in the past decade is that storage is no longer a marginal balancing tool but a rapidly scaling infrastructural layer that actively shapes how electricity markets operate. Ten years ago, batteries were still largely confined to pilot projects, niche applications or short-duration backup systems. Today they are being deployed at grid scale, traded as financial assets, and optimised in real time through software that treats electricity not as a continuous flow but as a sequence of arbitrage opportunities across seconds, hours and days.
This shift is driven by three interlocking developments. First, costs have fallen dramatically, particularly for lithium-ion chemistries, making multi-hour storage economically viable in wholesale electricity markets. Second, the architecture of storage has changed: it is no longer just electrochemical hardware that offers (reserve) energy capacity to devices such as cars or mobiles, but a layered storage Stack of battery racks, inverters, sensors and cloud-based control platforms that allow thousands of distributed units to behave as a single coordinated resource. Third, storage has become market-facing. In many regions it now earns revenue not only from energy shifting, but also from providing grid services such as frequency regulation, capacity support and congestion relief.
As a result, storage is no longer an accessory to the energy grid but one of its organising principles. A future energy system will not simply generate and transport electricity. It will continuously decide whether energy should be consumed, stored, exchanged or sold, often in milliseconds and increasingly through automated systems that respond to price signals and grid conditions.
This transformation is also reshaping industrial production. According to the Financial Times, ten North American battery plants are being retooled to manufacture cells suited to stationary energy storage. With EV sales falling short of earlier expectations, manufacturers are redirecting investments towards a rapidly growing storage market. It illustrates the shift of batteries from a complement to the EV stack into an independent layer of the energy stack. The same factories that were once designed to power the automotive transition are increasingly being repositioned to stabilise electricity grids, support data-intensive industries and absorb the volatility of renewable generation.
In parallel, a new geography of energy is emerging: one in which storage is co-located with solar farms, wind parks, industrial clusters and data centres, effectively turning electricity infrastructure into a distributed, software-coordinated system rather than a centralised network of generation and consumption.
The AI boom intensifies this transition. Hyperscale data centres require enormous quantities of electricity, but above all they require continuous and reliable power. Interruptions are costly, while overloaded grids can delay the construction of new facilities or prevent them from connecting altogether.
For technology companies, access to consistent electricity is therefore becoming as strategically important as access to chips, data and cloud infrastructure. Storage allows data centres to manage peaks in consumption, make better use of locally generated renewable electricity and reduce their dependence on congested grids. It can also provide emergency capacity when the wider system comes under pressure.
This creates a reinforcing cycle. The expansion of AI increases electricity demand; rising demand creates stronger incentives to invest in generation and storage; and greater storage capacity makes it possible to build more data centres and other electricity-intensive infrastructure.
Energy and computation are consequently becoming inseparable. The digital economy was once imagined as an almost immaterial realm of information. In reality, as many have argued since, its further expansion increasingly depends on very material questions: where electricity is generated, how it is stored, which grids can deliver it and who controls the relevant infrastructure.
Where control over oil reserves and shipping routes once defined energy power, control over batteries, critical minerals and industrial supply chains may increasingly fulfil a comparable function in tomorrow’s world. China is exceptionally well positioned in this emerging order. Its companies benefit from technological expertise, integrated supply chains, large-scale manufacturing and a sizeable domestic market. CATL’s energy-storage activities, for example, have grown from a marginal part of its business into a major source of revenue.
This produces a paradox for Europe and the United States. By investing in renewable energy and storage, they seek to become less dependent on imported fossil fuels. Yet unless they also develop their own technological and industrial capacity, they may exchange one form of dependence for another: from Middle Eastern oil and Russian gas to Chinese batteries, minerals, inverters and energy-management systems.
Autonomy cannot therefore mean national self-sufficiency. No European country can independently reproduce the entire energy value chain. It must instead mean reducing critical dependencies, maintaining alternative suppliers and ensuring that essential systems continue to function when individual components or international relationships fail.
For the Netherlands, this is particularly urgent. As an energy-importing country with a highly digitalised economy, an already dense electricity grid and ambitious plans for further electrification, it is exposed on several fronts at once. For much of the post-war period, countries such as the Netherlands could treat energy as a largely dependable utility. As long as electricity came from the socket and cheap fuel reached the market, the underlying infrastructure, supply chains and geopolitical dependencies remained mostly invisible.
That assumption is becoming untenable. Energy systems are increasingly exposed to several interacting pressures: geopolitical conflict, volatile commodity markets, the intermittency of renewable generation, congested electricity grids, cyber threats and growing demand from electrification and digital infrastructure.
The central risk is therefore not a single disruption, but the concurrence of several disruptions. In its 2026 report Autonoom en veilig: hoe Nederland zijn energiepositie kan versterken, Topsector Energie warns that future energy crises are likely to resemble a “perfect storm”, in which geopolitical, technological and infrastructural vulnerabilities reinforce one another. This changes the meaning of energy security. It is no longer enough to diversify oil and gas imports or maintain emergency reserves. Countries must also consider where their batteries, inverters and transformers, their control systems and other software, and their critical raw materials come from, and who ultimately retains control over them.
Furthermore, the report argues that one of the most serious threats may not be direct warfare or physical sabotage, but political coercion through energy dependence. And not just because of the energy supply: imported devices and software-dependent infrastructure may contain remote access functions or depend on foreign updates and cloud services. In an international crisis, such dependencies could potentially be used to disrupt parts of the energy system.
Accordingly, they plea for a more flexible and decentralised system, developed in close cooperation with neighbouring countries. Local storage, interconnected microgrids and distributed generation could maintain essential functions if parts of the national grid or international supply chain fail. Redundancy, usually regarded as inefficient in purely economic terms, becomes valuable when resilience is taken seriously.
Its recommendations also include investing in circular raw-material chains, strengthening the European ICT and energy-technology sectors and establishing multidisciplinary crisis teams composed of electrical engineers, mechanics, IT specialists and other technical professionals. Energy resilience is ultimately not only a question of infrastructure, but also of the human capacity to repair and operate that infrastructure under exceptional circumstances.
The storage transformation is not only geopolitically driven but will also be cultural. Energy has traditionally remained outside the attention of most households and businesses. People used electricity but rarely had to consider when it was generated, where it came from or whether the grid had sufficient capacity.
That may change as consumers become active participants in the energy system. Households and companies will increasingly generate, store, manage and trade electricity themselves. Smart systems may charge batteries when renewable electricity is abundant, postpone consumption during peak periods and sell power back to the grid when demand and prices rise.
Energy could consequently come to resemble data or money: a resource that is continuously monitored, managed and exchanged. Home batteries, neighbourhood cooperatives and local microgrids may become expressions of autonomy and even status. ‘Energy sovereignty’ would then no longer refer only to states, but also to cities, communities, businesses and households. Just as crypto day traders emerged around digital assets, individuals and communities could emerge as 'surplus energy day traders,' buying, storing, and selling excess electricity.
At the same time, flexibility may develop into a new social norm. Adjusting consumption to the availability of electricity could be framed as a collective responsibility, comparable to recycling or conserving water. Recent calls by the Dutch Renewable Energy Association illustrate how energy security, affordability and climate policy are already converging. Its emergency plan for reducing natural-gas consumption argues that the Netherlands could cut annual use by another 10 billion cubic metres within five years, while a separate plan for reducing oil consumption proposes cutting domestic oil use for mobility by one-third by 2030.
To sum up: the strategic importance of energy storage lies precisely in this convergence of economic, geopolitical and cultural transitions. It supports renewable energy, protects grids against fluctuations, enables the growth of AI, reduces exposure to fossil-fuel shocks, creates new industrial and technological markets and facilitates cultural shifts.
But storage does not automatically produce autonomy or autarky. Its geopolitical value depends on who manufactures the cells, controls the raw materials, develops the software, sets the standards and can keep the system operating in a crisis.
For countries such as the Netherlands, the task is therefore broader than installing more batteries. It means building a resilient energy architecture: decentralised but interconnected, digitally advanced but cybersecure, internationally integrated but not critically dependent on a single supplier.
In the twentieth century, geopolitical power belonged largely to those who controlled the production and circulation of fossil fuels. In the emerging electrical economy, it may increasingly belong to those who can store energy, direct its flows and decide when—and to whom—it becomes available. Energy storage is not merely the battery of tomorrow. It is becoming one of tomorrow’s principal forms of power.
