Oil at $106 Is Selling More EVs Than Any Subsidy

The Hormuz oil crisis is driving the fastest consumer shift away from fossil fuels in history. With oil at $106 per barrel and gasoline at $6.81 per gallon in parts of the US, people worldwide are buying electric vehicles, installing rooftop solar, and switching to electric stoves — not because of climate policy, but because fossil fuels just became too expensive to tolerate. Countries that invested in renewables early, like Spain, Portugal, and China, are paying a fraction of their neighbours' energy bills. Countries that didn't are rationing fuel.

A used EV dealership in San Francisco tells you everything you need to know about the Hormuz crisis.

Gas hit $6.81 at the station next door. Appointments to test-drive electric cars under $30,000 surged. "Gas prices are coming up in almost every customer conversation," Maximilian Quertermous, co-founder of used EV dealer Ever, told Bloomberg. "The momentum of the last few weeks is among the strongest we've seen."

One dealership doesn't make a trend. But the same story is playing out on every continent. In Southeast Asia, buyers are flooding BYD showrooms. In Pakistan, electric rickshaws are sold out. In India, where cooking oil shortages followed the Hormuz blockade, there's a run on electric stoves. In Germany and Nigeria — countries with nothing else in common — rooftop solar inquiries are spiking. In the UK, homeowners are finally buying heat pumps.

This isn't a climate movement. It's a price revolt.

The Numbers Don't Lie

"We are in the middle of the second energy shock in the 2020s," said Kingsmill Bond, energy strategist at UK think tank Ember, comparing the current crisis to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That shock pushed Europe to accelerate wind and solar. This one is pushing consumers everywhere to do the same — but from the bottom up.

The IEA's Fatih Birol put it bluntly at Australia's National Press Club on Monday: "The main driver will not be climate change. The main driver will be energy security."

The data backs him up. Renewables accounted for 85% of all new global power capacity last year. Solar alone has become so cheap that Birol called it "a business, not a romantic story." And now $106 oil is proving the business case in real time.

Clean energy stocks tell the market's verdict. SolarEdge Technologies, which makes solar inverters, is up 45% since the war began. Battery giant CATL has jumped 29% in Hong Kong. BYD is up 12%. Plug Power, which makes fuel cells, has gained 27%. Investors aren't betting on climate policy. They're betting on consumer behaviour.

Two Europes, One Crisis

The starkest evidence that renewables work as an energy shield sits on the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal spent years expanding wind and solar while maintaining limited interconnection with the rest of Europe's grid. The result: wholesale electricity at €60–70 per megawatt-hour.

Germany and Italy — still heavily exposed to gas-linked pricing — are paying over €150/MWh. That's more than double.

Portugal's energy ministry stated it plainly: with 80% of power coming from renewables, "the price of electricity is relatively protected." Portugal has even pre-approved electricity price caps as a precaution. Spain, meanwhile, is spending €5 billion to shield 20 million households from the crisis — but it's spending from a position of strength, not desperation.

France, with its nuclear backbone, has seen similar price stability. The countries panicking are the ones still tethered to gas.

This isn't ideology. It's arithmetic. Systems built on fossil fuel pricing are expensive. Systems built on renewables aren't. The Hormuz crisis is the stress test. The results are in.

Pakistan's Quiet Revolution

The most surprising energy shield isn't in Europe. It's in Pakistan.

Over the past five years, Pakistan has undergone a rooftop solar boom that barely registered in English-language media. Households and businesses discovered that solar panels with batteries were cheaper than grid electricity — and installed them anyway, without waiting for government programs.

The numbers are staggering. According to think tanks Renewables First and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Pakistan's solar expansion has avoided $12 billion in oil and gas imports since 2020. At current prices, it could save another $6.3 billion in 2026 alone.

"Households and businesses have discovered that rooftop solar coupled with batteries are cheaper than electricity imported from the grid," said Oxford's Jan Rosenow. Every gigawatt of distributed solar deployed is now a hedge against the energy crisis. Pakistan still imports LNG through Hormuz-exposed routes, but its rooftop solar means it's absorbing the shock better than countries with no alternatives.

Compare that to Bangladesh, which has no solar buffer and is rationing fuel and shutting factories. Same region. Same crisis. Completely different outcomes.

China's $28 Billion Advantage

Then there's China. More than 50% of new car sales are now electric. The country has the world's largest stockpile of strategic oil reserves and generates the majority of its electricity from coal and renewables — not imported gas.

CNN reported this week that China's EV adoption alone saves the country roughly $28 billion per year in avoided oil imports. That's money that isn't flowing to Gulf oil producers, isn't exposed to Hormuz chokepoints, and isn't subject to price swings every time Iran makes a statement.

Nepal — where 73% of new car sales are electric, powered almost entirely by domestic hydropower — is barely feeling the oil crisis at all. It's the second-highest EV adoption rate in the world, behind Norway.

These aren't theoretical projections. They're real savings happening now, in the middle of the worst oil crisis in history.

The Paradox

Here's the uncomfortable part. The same Hormuz crisis that's driving consumers toward clean energy is also pushing some countries back to coal.

Asia is burning more coal because it's the only fuel some countries can get. The Guardian noted that the war could disrupt the transport of aluminum — critical for building solar panels — since the Middle East accounts for 9% of global production and smelters are shutting down. Inflation driven by the war makes the upfront cost of renewable installations harder to finance.

So the short-term picture is messy. Some countries are leaping forward. Others are sliding backward. The difference isn't geography or wealth — it's which investments were made five years ago.

What Matters Next

Every major oil shock in history has permanently changed consumer behaviour. The 1973 embargo gave us fuel-efficient Japanese cars. The 2000s oil price surge funded lithium-ion battery research that made today's EVs possible. The 2022 Ukraine crisis accelerated Europe's wind and solar build-out.

The 2026 Hormuz crisis will be remembered as the moment consumers worldwide stopped waiting for climate policy and started voting with their wallets. The energy security argument — which climate activists have been making for decades — just got its most powerful proof of concept.

Birol's line lands differently at $106 a barrel: "Ten years ago, solar was a romantic story. Now solar is a business."

The countries that treated it as a business are paying €60 for electricity. The ones that treated it as romance are paying €150 and rationing.

The market has made its choice. The question is whether governments can keep up.