Over the past week, three events have made me revisit the blog I wrote last January on the paradigm shift we were then starting to see emerging - and its implications for hydropower.

Climate resilience = energy resilience

First, a severe winter snowstorm in the United States was a reminder that the statement “to be climate resilient you need to be water resilient” needs to be updated to include “and energy resilient”. The impact of blackouts in our increasingly electrified and energy-dependent societies is expensive: power outages cost the United States an estimated $ 44 billion last year. In worst-case scenarios, they can also be life-threatening.  

Meanwhile, rising electricity demand from data centres and increased electrification mean that the power reserves grid operators once relied on are increasingly constrained, while dependence on traditional generation – in this case the possibility of natural gas wells freezing – increases vulnerability. It’s telling that in preparation for the snowstorm, the US Energy Secretary ordered grid operators to make more than 35 GW of backup generation available to prevent blackouts.

Energy infrastructure = strategic infrastructure

Second, Russia’s targeted destruction of Ukrainian power generation and transmission facilities in the middle of a particularly cold winter underlined a reality that is becoming harder to ignore: in a world marked by rising geopolitical tension, energy infrastructure’s strategic importance is more acute than ever.

This has huge ramifications globally. Electricity systems now underpin heating, mobility, communications, industry and defence. As the risk of conflict increases, building energy security and resilience should be a top priority for all countries. Systems designed for generation or cost alone are ill-suited to withstand deliberate disruption, whether from conflict, cyberattack or coercion through supply chains.

Energy security = energy sovereignty

This brings us to the third event, namely the new reality of international relations that was so starkly on display at Davos. To paraphrase Thucydides’ famous quote, this is a reality where “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must, and those in between navigate between them by joining forces with one side or the other when they can”.  

In this new reality, countries will need to think about both sides of energy security – not only steady, uninterrupted, reliable and affordable energy supply; but also energy sovereignty - that is, meeting energy needs in an autonomous and sustainable way, guaranteeing independence and having direct control over energy resources, production and infrastructure.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney explained this at Davos, even as he lamented the implications for the world: “The multilateral institutions…. are under threat. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable.”

As IHA’s President Malcolm Turnbull often notes, there is little value in trading dependence on one monopoly supplier for another. Replacing reliance on gas from one supplier with dependence on a single battery supply chain or another gas supplier does not deliver sovereignty. True energy sovereignty comes from diversification, resilience and the ability to withstand shocks, whether climatic or geopolitical.

Implications for hydropower – an inconvenient truth

The uncomfortable implication of the above is that if anything, my blog from last year needs to be updated to be more hardnosed in its approach. As a student of international relations, I cannot help but wish I didn’t have to make this argument, but the truth is that hydropower is a technology that is remarkably well placed to support countries in this new reality.  

Hydropower offers a strategic advantage over technologies that depend on highly concentrated supply chains for critical minerals or manufacturing. It depends largely on site-specific resources, and its industrial base is geographically diverse with established industries across almost every continent.  

Hydropower, and especially pumped storage, is a key component of resilient, diversified grids. It serves to balance and complement everything from wind and solar to nuclear power to chemical batteries. It provides storage, flexibility and stability to grids in a way that no other technology can do, as well as supplying over 14 % of global power, according to the latest IHA World Hydropower Outlook.

So, what should we do?

The 2025 World Hydropower Outlook shows that there is a healthy pipeline for new hydropower exceeding 1,075 GW, with pumped storage accounting for more than half of that total. It also shows that this is nowhere near enough to meet global needs.

As Mark Carney said in Davos, it’s time to name realities and “have a recognition of what’s happening and [the] determination to act accordingly.” To me, this means acknowledging three things:

1. Permitting paralysis must give way to long-term, strategic thinking: The best time to build critical infrastructure was years before it was needed. The second-best time is now. Planning and permitting frameworks must reflect what the grid will require in the future, not just current demand patterns. Long lead time infrastructure such as pumped storage hydropower cannot be delivered at speed if regulatory systems are designed for a different era. The scale of the global hydropower pipeline shows that opportunity exists. The challenge is not the absence of projects, but the ability to deliver them in time.

2. Affordability is not just about price, it is also about priorities: Cheap and quick is not the same as good value. Affordability debates often focus narrowly on upfront costs. That framing misses the point. Affordability is fundamentally a question of choice. What are governments choosing to fund, protect, or accelerate, and what risks and long term costs are they willing to accept as a result. Price is a surface signal. Priorities determine whether that price makes sense. Systems that appear cheap in the short term can prove extraordinarily expensive when outages, emergency interventions, and lost productivity are taken into account. The $44 billion annual cost of power outages in the United States is one illustration of this reality. When affordability is viewed through the lens of system value and long-term resilience, investments in robust infrastructure such as hydropower and pumped storage look very different.

3. Private funding needs public policies: Finally, building resilient and sovereign energy systems requires partnership between governments and industry. Markets are effective at delivering the lowest-cost option in the short term. They are not designed to internalise system risk, geopolitical exposure, or long-term resilience. Policy and incentives are therefore essential to guide private capital toward outcomes that strengthen energy systems rather than weaken them. That includes recognising the full value of flexibility, storage, and grid services, modernising permitting processes, and aligning energy investment with broader strategic objectives.

One year after I wrote about the paradigm shift, it’s clear I did not go far enough. I suspect I was not the only one. The task now is to recognise the new reality and act accordingly.  

Hydropower, with its unique combination of renewable generation, grid stability and resilient supply chains, has a central role to play in building energy systems that are secure, sovereign, and fit for the world we are entering. The sooner governments start enabling new projects, the readier their energy grids will be to confront the new reality.