Energy security doesn’t come from drilling more. Here’s what actually works

The one-liner problem

Four simple words, and the argument that keeps derailing the climate conversation. Helen knows exactly why it keeps winning. The counter is harder to land: the Climate Change Committee found that one fossil fuel price spike of 2022’s scale costs as much as the entire net zero transition to 2050. For every pound invested in the transition, the benefits are between 2.2 and 4.1 times higher. None of that fits on a bumper sticker. ‘We haven’t necessarily always got that kind of snappy answer,’ she said.

Helen’s point of view was clear, the solution to our economic woes is NOT to abandon net zero targets: ‘It sounds like a common sense solution. But it wouldn’t lead to reductions in people’s energy bills.’ Part of the problem is structural: electricity bills across most liberalised markets are set by the marginal cost of gas, not the cost of renewables. So even as renewables get cheaper, bills don’t come down. She reached back to her philosophy degree for the term: truthiness. Something that feels true because it has a ring of truth to it. ‘You do have to get underneath and look at the facts. But we’re in a media environment that doesn’t necessarily prioritise that.’

Countries that moved faster are less exposed

The energy security argument is firmly on the side of renewables. Spain’s experience this year made that concrete. Countries further ahead on the transition were less exposed to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. The same pattern is playing out more broadly. The Russian invasion of Ukraine sent a signal, particularly across Southeast Asia, that relying on global fossil fuel markets carries real risk. The response has been complicated though: many countries are keeping coal running longer while simultaneously making big investments in renewables.

Pakistan is the most striking example. With an unreliable grid and no top-down push, people started buying cheap solar panels, plugging them in themselves, sharing how-to videos on TikTok. Diesel purchases fell 35% in a single year. ‘People haven’t waited around for the government,’ Helen said.

The opportunity is real and measurable

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) found that the net zero economy already supports over one million jobs in the UK and added 105 billion pounds to the economy in 2025. In the first half of 2025, for the first time ever, the world generated more electricity from renewables than from coal. In the EU, wind and solar generated more power than all fossil fuels combined for the first time in 2025. The UN Secretary General, speaking in London this week, called on all AI companies to be running on renewable electricity by 2030.

‘There will be a transition,’ Helen said, echoing the Secretary General. ‘The question is how fair is it, how smooth is it, how many crises do we have to go through to get the pace and scale of change we need.’

About the Podcast 

Screw It is a podcast from Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, exploring the “art of assembly” in business, sustainability, and life at home. The series invites global experts and leaders to discuss how we piece together better homes and societies, even when life looks nothing like the manual. From a company that wants people to sit comfortably, but recognises that progress is often uncomfortable, Screw It ditches the corporate script to embrace the “wonderful mess” of building a better future. 

About Ingka Group 

With IKEA retail operations in 31 markets, Ingka Group is the largest IKEA retailer and represents 87% of IKEA retail sales. It is a strategic partner to develop and innovate the IKEA business and help define common IKEA strategies. Ingka Group owns and operates IKEA sales channels under franchise agreements with Inter IKEA Systems B.V. It has three business areas: IKEA Retail, Ingka Investments and Ingka Centres. Read more on Ingka.com. 

Screw It – Episode 8 – Full Conversation Transcript

Kat: Welcome to Screw It. It’s London Climate Action Week and I’m joined by Helen Clarkson OBE, the CEO of Climate Group. We talk about what a future on renewables could look like and what’s actually stopping us from getting there. I hope you’ll enjoy.

Kat: Helen, thank you so much for joining me.

Helen: Thank you.

Kat: We’re at London Climate Action Week and the temperature is record-breaking. What’s been your biggest takeaway so far from the week?

Helen: I’m never going to celebrate an extreme weather event. But it does bring home the stakes. We’re seeing headlines every day about what’s happening across Europe. It’s adding to the sense of urgency. One of the things I’ve been thinking about this week is how much that linkage is being made in the broader media. How is it getting out beyond the climate community? This week I heard the UN Secretary General speak. He was connecting the two, talking about how do we really shift the transition, make it go faster, make it fairer.

Kat: Before we dive in, you went from being a chartered accountant to working for MSF, Doctors Without Borders, in some of the world’s most extreme humanitarian contexts, before running one of the world’s most influential climate organisations. What made you go into the climate conversation?

Helen: The chartered accountant was a bit of a sideways move. My degree was in philosophy and I graduated thinking, people don’t really want philosophers very much. So I trained in finance, but then went straight to work for MSF. While I was working there, particularly my last field job in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, we were doing a lot of work with women who were victims of sexual violence. Their problems were very much economic. Even if they were a victim, their husband would often kick them out. They were asking, how am I going to feed myself? How am I going to feed my family? And if they had a bad rainy season, that got compounded. That really brought home for me the connection between women’s health and economics. When I moved back home and thought about my career, I asked: do I want to stay in humanitarian aid, or do I want to move upstream of the problems? That got me thinking about sustainability, this real link between society, economy and the environment. I did a master’s in the evenings while working, then moved to Forum for the Future. After nearly ten years, I thought: I really want to focus on climate, because that’s the issue driving the urgency of all the other sustainability problems.

Kat: Can you tell me a little bit about what Climate Group does?

Helen: We’re a nonprofit, headquartered in London with offices in India, China, and the US. We build big networks of businesses and governments, get them to make commitments on climate, 100% renewable electricity, zero-carbon steel or concrete by 2050, and then report on progress. But what we’re really interested in is: where can’t you buy renewable electricity? What’s stopping you? That helps identify systemic barriers. And then we do policy work. We take a collective business voice to policymakers, saying: if you change this regulation, there’s investment ready to come.

Kat: What are the main barriers right now?

Helen: A lot of it is quite nitty-gritty and regulatory. Permitting, where can you put renewable energy assets? Grids, how do you feed electrons in? In lots of countries there’s a queue of renewable projects that need to get onto the grid. We also need more electricity demand. In the UK we’ve got high renewable supply, but a lot of our heating still relies on gas. So we need to electrify demand at the domestic level as well.

Kat: It feels like a very fragmented dialogue politically.

Helen: The people who win in the media are the ones with one-liners. ‘Net zero is expensive.’ It’s not really based on the underlying issues, but you’ve already lost because it’s taken you ten sentences to make your point. Renewables are cheaper, that’s been shown time and again. And we’re seeing how the supply of fossil fuels can literally be weaponised. But people’s lived experience is that their bills aren’t going down. As soon as you try to explain that it’s the market price for gas, you’ve kind of lost the argument.

Kat: Tony Blair said recently that the UK should abandon its net zero targets and exploit its remaining oil and gas reserves.

Helen: It’s frustrating. That’s an easy talking point. It sounds simple, there’s a bit of oil in the North Sea, why don’t we drill that. But it wouldn’t lead to reductions in people’s energy bills. Going back to my philosophy degree, there’s a concept called truthiness. Something that sounds like it’s probably true because it has a ring of truth to it. You do have to get underneath and look at the facts. We’re in a media environment that doesn’t necessarily prioritise that. And a lot of climate people still think if I show you one more graph, I’m going to win you over. We have to get out of that. We need to work with politicians on the reforms that would make the cheapness of renewables actually get through to people’s bills. In the UK, a lot of the transition cost has sat on individual energy bills, whereas it’s really a national infrastructure investment that should be on general taxation.

Kat: Can you give me some examples of where the transition has gone well?

Helen: Spain is a really interesting one. During the recent crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, a lot of European countries were immediately looking at relaxing climate regulations. But Spain said, hang on, we’ve installed a lot of renewables, we’re not interested in changing that. Countries further ahead on the shift to renewables have been less affected. That’s brought home the linkage between renewables and energy security. And then there’s Pakistan. With no government incentive scheme, people started buying solar panels directly, plugging them into their own systems, sharing how-to videos on TikTok. Diesel purchases fell 35% in one year. People haven’t waited for the government. This is cheap, I can plug it in and go.

Kat: Yesterday Climate Group hosted the Opportunity Summit. Tell me about the idea behind it.

Helen: We wanted to look at where the opportunities are in Europe. There wasn’t really an event doing that. We always want to keep telling the positive story, looking for where the societal, economic, and environmental opportunities are. It’s great to hear from businesses that have been progressive and found a way of competing using the transition. Trane Technologies, one of our key sponsors, is a company where this transition is fundamental to the business. Siemens was there too.

Kat: What role do companies play when it comes to policy?

Helen: Policy makers want to hear from companies. There’s an opportunity to help shape the regulations we need. In the run-up to COP26 we brought together British businesses into the UK Electric Fleet Coalition, took it to government, and said: these businesses want electric vehicles, here’s what needs to change. In the UK, more than 50% of new vehicles each year are in corporate fleets, which feed into the second-hand market. If you want 100% by 2050, businesses need to be making that shift now. That collective voice to government is powerful.

Kat: If we made the switch, powered by wind and solar and hydro, what does the world look like?

Helen: Companies aren’t competing on where they get their electricity from. So that’s an area where you can collaborate. The leading companies have learned a lot about how to do that in this period. But I’d hope that in a few years, if we’ve solved it, we get back to straight competition, because that means we’ve done it.

Kat: Do renewables even out the playing field between countries?

Helen: A lot of countries in Africa are going straight to renewables, skipping fossil fuels. The technologies have come down in price and China is incentivising the shift through a trading relationship rather than the traditional aid model. The Russian invasion of Ukraine sent a clear signal to Southeast Asia about energy security. What’s interesting is you’re seeing dual announcements: keep coal running a bit longer, but make big investments in renewables at the same time. Maybe you skip the oil and gas phase entirely.

Kat: China dominates solar panel manufacturing. Is that a risk?

Helen: It’s a monopoly risk. But a lot of the big breakthroughs in scaling solar have come from China. I think it’s a mistake for European industries to say the response is to defend our corner. Why aren’t they innovating to meet it? China has been publishing five-year plans telling us exactly what it’s going to do. It wants to be an R&D superpower by 2035. At the same time the US is cutting science funding. If one place is doing all the research, development, and manufacturing, you really do have a monopoly. But they’ve given us advance notice. Why are we not responding?

Kat: What about intermittency? We can’t always have sun or wind.

Helen: Batteries. That’s the big story of the next ten-plus years. Someone I know was in China recently and saw a building where all the windows are solar panels, with a three-storey basement car park of electric vehicles acting as a battery, vehicle-to-grid technology, a closed loop system. That’s the sort of thinking we need more of here. In Europe, the issue is mostly retrofit. We’ve got buildings from the 19th century. We need to move much faster on insulation and electrification.

Kat: Why make the transition now when it means heavy upfront costs?

Helen: There’s a cost to maintaining the existing system too, and no one talks about that. Once you’ve built the renewable system, running costs are very low. With fossil fuels you’re always buying more fuel, and that cost runs on forever. The problem in the UK is a lot of the transition cost has been placed on individual energy bills, whereas it’s really a national infrastructure investment that should be on general taxation.

Kat: You wrote recently about AI being an enabler of smarter renewable energy systems.

Helen: It goes both ways. There’s the energy cost of AI, data centres, water. But if you use AI to improve energy systems and efficiency, it can bring costs down. Ideally you’d have all AI running off renewable electricity. The UN Secretary General was calling on all AI companies to be running off renewables by 2030. What you’re really saying is: don’t build new data centres if they’re not on renewables. There’s also a growing licence-to-operate issue for the hyperscalers. Civil society is scrutinising these companies, and that’s a powerful force.

Kat: What about jobs in the transition?

Helen: The CBI found the green economy in the UK already has 1.1 million jobs and is worth 105 billion pounds. The fastest-growing jobs in the US a few years ago were wind engineers, with similar skill sets to fossil fuel industries. The bigger challenge is geography. Oil workers in Aberdeen are in one community. Wind engineers are distributed across the country. It’s very hard to see those distributed jobs as a community in the same way. The dislocation isn’t really about skills. It’s about that sense of place and industry.

Kat: Beyond setting their own targets, what should companies be doing?

Helen: Policy engagement. Policy makers want to hear from companies. There’s still an opportunity to help shape the regulations we need. Businesses want consistent policy that doesn’t shift over time. That creates a landscape where you can compete.

Kat: Do you feel hopeful for the future?

Helen: It goes in waves. Overall I’m an optimistic person. I think humanity generally wants to keep itself alive. The UN Secretary General said this week: there will be a transition. And I think that’s true. The question is how fair is it, how smooth is it, how many crises do we have to go through to get the pace and scale of change we need? What gives me hope is the economics, driven by China, but I’d love to see more of that distributed, with the rest of the world responding competitively rather than hoping to sweat its assets until this passes. Because it’s not going to pass. We have to tackle this. And we will get there.

Kat: Helen, thank you so much for taking the time.

Helen: Thank you very much.