This Week in Voltage
Brent crude hit $126 a barrel this week — a four-year high — before pulling back to settle around $114 after reports that U.S. Central Command was briefing President Trump on potential military action against Iran. WTI closed above $105. Both contracts are up roughly 60% since the U.S. and Israeli-led war against Iran began on February 28, when the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint that carries approximately a fifth of the world's oil and LNG — effectively closed.
Goldman Sachs estimates that exports through Hormuz have fallen to just 4% of normal levels. Over sixty energy sites across the Gulf are damaged. Even if the Strait reopened tomorrow, the risk premium would linger for months — wells need time to restart, tanker insurance markets need to reprice, and the psychological damage to "reliable" fossil supply chains is permanent.
Meanwhile, in Wyoming, Bechtel broke ground on TerraPower's Natrium reactor — the first NRC construction permit for a non-light-water reactor design in more than 40 years, and the first commercial reactor permit of any kind in nearly a decade. The 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor can temporarily boost output to 500 MW using molten-salt storage, turning a steady nuclear heat source into a dispatchable power block. Target completion: 2030.
Two stories. One thesis. Let me make the connection explicit.
Deep Charge: Pain at the Pump Is the Best Electrification Subsidy Ever Invented
The 1970s oil shocks produced the first serious wave of energy diversification in the industrialized world. Nuclear buildouts accelerated across France and Japan. Fuel economy standards appeared. The IEA was founded. But the alternatives weren't ready — there was no scalable substitute for oil in transportation, no cost-competitive replacement for gas in heating. So when prices stabilized, the world exhaled and went back to the pump.
This time is structurally different, and Ember's analysis of what they're calling the "twin fossil shock" makes the case precisely. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine shut the world's largest fossil fuel exporter out of its largest market. The 2026 Hormuz closure has now taken out the world's largest oil and LNG supply route. One shock is an event. Two is a pattern. And the critical difference from the 1970s is that this time, the alternatives exist, are cost-competitive, and are scaling.
Solar, wind, batteries, EVs — these aren't experimental technologies waiting for a breakthrough. They're deployed infrastructure waiting for a demand signal. The Hormuz shock just fired that signal at deafening volume.
The consumer response is already measurable. Autotrader reported a 28% jump in inquiries about buying a new EV since the war began on February 28. EV leasing specialist Octopus Electric Vehicles saw inquiries rise 36% over the same period. These aren't ideological converts — these are people doing math. When gasoline costs double, the total cost of ownership calculation for an EV shifts dramatically, and it shifts fast.
Here's the civilizational point that gets lost in the day-to-day price coverage: oil shocks don't just create demand for alternatives. They permanently restructure the risk calculus for energy dependence. Every fleet manager, every infrastructure planner, every national energy ministry is now running the same calculation: what is the cost of remaining exposed to a chokepoint that a $20,000 drone can close? Ember puts it bluntly — the weapons needed to shut a maritime chokepoint have never been cheaper. A $20,000 drone can stop a $150 million tanker. The economics of fossil fuel vulnerability have changed permanently.
The Automaker Contradiction Reveals the Real Battleground
There's a frustrating subplot in the EV demand surge: the legacy auto industry is running in the wrong direction at exactly the wrong moment. Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have all reversed course on aggressive EV strategies, booking tens of billions in combined write-offs and restructuring costs as they pivot back toward internal combustion.
The irony is almost too perfect. The companies best positioned to capture the demand surge triggered by $114 oil are the ones that just spent two years retreating from the technology that would let them do it. They read the 2024 demand softness as a structural signal rather than a cyclical one, and now they're caught flat-footed while consumer interest spikes.
This is what happens when you optimize for quarterly earnings instead of civilizational trajectory. The EV demand surge from Hormuz isn't a blip — it's a preview of what happens every time fossil supply chains crack, which, per the pattern Ember identifies, is happening with increasing frequency and severity. The companies that stayed committed to electrification are now sitting on the right side of a demand curve that just got a massive exogenous boost.
The deeper lesson: energy transformation doesn't require perfect policy or ideological consensus. It requires price signals strong enough to make the alternative obviously rational. $114 Brent is that signal. $126 Brent is a louder version of the same signal. The market is doing the work that carbon taxes and fuel economy mandates spent decades trying to accomplish — and it's doing it faster.
Nuclear Fills the Gap That Renewables Can't Fill Alone
The Hormuz shock is primarily an oil story, but its implications extend to the entire fossil fuel complex. LNG supply through the Strait has also been disrupted, which means European and Asian gas markets are repricing simultaneously. That's not just a heating and industrial cost problem — it's an electricity generation problem for every grid still running gas peakers.
This is where the TerraPower groundbreaking in Wyoming becomes more than a symbolic milestone. The Natrium reactor's design — a 345 MW baseload plant that can surge to 500 MW using molten-salt thermal storage — is precisely the architecture a post-fossil grid needs. Renewables provide the volume; dispatchable nuclear provides the floor. You can't run a civilization on solar and wind alone without either massive storage or massive overbuilding. Natrium is the answer to the question that intermittency keeps asking.
The 2030 completion target matters here. The Hormuz disruption has made the cost of fossil dependence viscerally clear to every grid operator in the world. The question is whether the nuclear construction pipeline can accelerate to meet the moment. TerraPower's NRC review — completed in under 18 months from application to construction permit — suggests the regulatory pathway is faster than the conventional wisdom assumed. The bottleneck now is execution: HALEU fuel supply, skilled labor, and supply chain depth for a reactor design that has no commercial predecessors.
I'd argue the Hormuz shock changes the political economy of nuclear permitting in ways that won't show up in the data for another 12-18 months. When energy security becomes a first-order national concern — not an environmental debate, not a climate argument, but a raw strategic vulnerability — the political resistance to nuclear construction softens considerably. Watch for accelerated permitting discussions in Japan, South Korea, and Central Europe over the next two quarters. The pattern from the 1970s is that shocks produce policy responses with roughly a 12-24 month lag. We're six weeks in.
By the Numbers
- $126/barrel — Brent crude intraday high on April 30, a four-year record, before settling at $114
- ~60% — Combined rally in Brent and WTI since the Iran war began February 28
- 4% — Goldman Sachs estimate of Hormuz export flow as a percentage of normal levels
- 28% — Jump in new EV inquiries on Autotrader since the war began
- 36% — Rise in EV leasing inquiries at Octopus Electric Vehicles over the same period
- 10+ million barrels/day — Estimated supply removal from Hormuz closure, roughly double the scale of either 1970s oil shock, per Ember
- 345 MW / 500 MW — Natrium reactor's baseload output and storage-boosted peak capacity
- <18 months — Time from TerraPower's construction permit application to NRC approval
What We're Fighting For
The Ember framing is exactly right: the response to this shock is a choice. You can reach back to the fossil playbook — emergency drilling, strategic reserve releases, diplomatic scrambles to reopen chokepoints — and buy yourself another decade of the same vulnerability. Or you can lean into the electric alternative that is, for the first time in history, actually ready to receive the investment.
The 1970s shocks produced the IEA and fuel economy standards. The 2020s twin shock — Russia in 2022, Hormuz in 2026 — is arriving at a moment when solar is the cheapest electricity source ever built, batteries are scaling faster than any energy technology in history, and the first advanced nuclear reactor in a generation just broke ground in Wyoming.
This is what civilizational inflection points look like from the inside. Not a clean transition announced at a press conference, but a messy, price-driven, geopolitically-forced reckoning that makes the old system obviously untenable and the new one obviously necessary. The pain is real. The $114 oil is real. The inflation it's triggering is real.
But so is the 28% EV demand spike. So is the Natrium groundbreaking. So is the fact that for the three-quarters of the world living in fossil-importing countries, the strategic case for electrification just became impossible to ignore.
The future is electric. The Strait of Hormuz just made sure more people know it.