Metals, markets, and megawatts: The critical materials challenge facing the energy sector

The energy transition is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Offshore wind farms are scaling up, solar photovoltaics are spreading across landscapes, battery storage is becoming central to grid stability, and transmission networks are expanding to meet rising demand. Together, these technologies are reshaping our global energy systems and redefining industrial priorities.

Yet beneath this visible build-out lies a quieter, more complex reality. The transition to net-zero is also a materials challenge. Clean energy systems depend on a relatively small group of critical raw materials, including copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth elements. These materials are extracted, refined, and traded through highly concentrated global supply chains that are environmentally intensive and increasingly shaped by geopolitical risk.

Materials and the energy transition

This marks a fundamental shift in how energy systems function. Unlike fossil fuel-based systems, where energy flows depend on continuous fuel supply, renewable technologies rely on a large upfront investment in materials. Once installed, wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries do not burn fuel, but their performance, cost and resilience are locked into the metals and minerals embedded at the point of manufacture. As a result, security of supply for critical raw materials will shape the speed, cost, and resilience of the energy transition just as much as policy ambition or investment flows.

These dependencies are already creating systemic pressures. Processing and refining capacity for many critical materials is concentrated in a handful of regions, creating strategic chokepoints. Commodity price volatility in copper, lithium, and nickel is complicating investment decisions and project economics. Manufacturing capacity for essential components such as HVDC cables, transformers, and turbine nacelles is stretched, leading to long lead times. At the same time, environmental, social, and governance risks within supply chains are constraining access to finance and challenging public acceptance.

Across Europe, North America and parts of Asia-Pacific, governments have recognised critical raw materials as recognised as strategic assets. The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act, alongside similar frameworks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere, reflects a shared understanding that materials security is now inseparable from energy security and industrial competitiveness. While terminology varies, the logic is consistent, i.e. materials that are indispensable to clean energy systems, yet vulnerable to disruption, represent a strategic risk that can no longer be treated as peripheral.

Without intervention, these pressures risk becoming binding constraints. Supply disruptions, price spikes, and material shortages could slow deployment, inflate costs for consumers, and weaken the competitiveness of clean energy industries. At worst, they could undermine confidence in the transition itself.

Resilience in a challenged materials landscape

The conversation needs to evolve from focusing on securing more supply. Managing critical materials risk requires a more systemic response that combines circular economy strategies, design innovation, foresight, supply chain diversification, and cross-sector collaboration. It also demands earlier integration of materials thinking into energy planning, investment decisions, and technology design. These are the issues that Patrick Moloney examines in his latest whitepaper.

Understanding the material foundations of the energy sector is becoming a defining factor in whether the transition succeeds, and how resilient it will be. If you want to learn much more about these critical materials, download the whitepaper.