Flessibilità after the Oil-and-Gas Shock
Energy security in a modern electricity system is not self-sufficiency. It is flexibility.
In our last instalment of this journey: what Italy reveals about the value of flexibility — and why a well-functioning system, like Castiglione’s sprezzatura, conceals its effort.
Returning from Perugia to Munich via Verona it was easy to think first about fuel and energy. The war had pushed oil and gas back to the front of the European energy conversation, and with them an old promise: that security lies in self-sufficiency.
And the view of the United States — well, at least the Trump administration, as you said — has been to double down on petrostate dominance. If you’re the largest oil and gas producer in the world, why are we buying all this cheap clean energy from China?
Energy security comes from being self-sufficient, producing more oil and gas than we need. And I think today’s conflict is a reminder that in an interconnected global market, there’s a limit to that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jason-bordoff.html
Italy is not a petrostate fantasy, nor is it a post-fossil system. It is a modern European power market in which gas still matters a lot. But with this fuel shock, the issue is not only the level of direct dependence, it is the system’s room to respond.
Flexibility, in this sense, is the modern form of energy security.
What does “self-sufficiency” mean, anyway? Who is the self and in relation to whom? How is that self distributed? Where does a city or region gets its power, exactly? How much of demand is met locally rather than elsewhere in the wider system? Have all the linkages been mapped out?
