Your solar panels run on Amazon’s cloud and are monitored by China.
I spent years working in the energy trading and utility world, where predictions and trades were developed, power plants dispatched and meter data analysed.
For renewables we rely more and more on connecting a great number of small energy generators through the cloud: virtual power plants. Models that decide what PV panels and wind turbines run , what scales up, and what gets dimmed.
And most of it runs on Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure.
Not just billing or client-apps but core operational intelligence. Gigawatts of power. US Cloud provides The software layer without which modern energy companies cannot function at scale. Or at all.
This matters more than most people realise. We might want to tell ourselves a reassuring story about energy sovereignty. We have renewables, right? We are electrifying. Gas leverage is fading.
But that story is only true if energy sovereignty stops at the physical layer — the turbine, the panel, the cable. It doesn’t.
If your virtual power plant runs on someone else’s computer in a far away jurisdiction, then your energy system assumes political alignment as a default condition. That was always a risk, but now it’s becoming a liability.
Foreign policy can be executed through software. Software has permissions, dependencies, and off switches. I am not claiming that anyone will suddenly pull them. I am pointing out something more uncomfortable: the option exists, and it exists asymmetrically.
Europe debates pipelines and LNG terminals. But an equally important part of that discussion are API keys, source code and identity providers.
If you cannot operate your energy system without foreign cloud permission, you are not energy sovereign. You operate as long as someone else allows it.
This is not an argument against renewables. It is not anti-American. It is not a call for digital autarky. It is a recognition that infrastructure dependency has moved up the stack, while our political and strategic thinking has not kept pace.
Much of Europe’s energy transition planning stops one layer too low.
If you work in energy, grid operations, flexibility markets, or trading, there is a simple question worth discussing with your team: if cloud access becomes contested — legally, politically, or economically — what still works?
If the answer is “not much”, then you have a hidden failure mode. And failure modes are where power lives.
If you do only one thing, demand re-hostability.
Not “multi-cloud”, where you exchanging dependency on AWS for dependency on Azure. If you work in the cross-section of energy and IT -or any other critical infrastructure,
Demand that any system critical to energy operations can be deployed, run, and recovered on infrastructure you can legally and physically control in Europe.
This does not need to be cheap or elegant. It needs to be survivable.
Resilience is not redundancy inside the same dependency. That is comfort with better marketing. True resilience is the ability to keep operating when alignment breaks.
If a vendor cannot explain, contractually and technically, how you would continue without them, they are not a supplier. They are a leverage point.
This will slow things down. It will upset procurement teams and innovation managers, they will probably say it’s not their decision to make.
Resilience has a price: It’s the insurance premium. Your risk department will know all about it.