NEW YORK – When the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, the story from most newsrooms described shocks to oil prices, liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply and supply chains which would eventually normalise.
ASEAN countries should draw a different conclusion. Price and supply shocks have been a regular feature of global energy markets. ASEAN’s vulnerability is no longer inevitable.
Energy sovereignty, industrial competitiveness and economic resilience now point in precisely the same direction: a regional, integrated, decarbonised energy system.
Much of great power competition has been enabled by the control of oil and gas supply chains, including choke points, embargoes and targeted regime change operations.
Weeks ago, the US put Cuba in a chokehold by limiting its access to imported oil just after the US led an illegal coup in Venezuela to gain access to its oil.
We are now seeing geopolitical power reshape LNG supply chains, directing limited supply to more powerful and better-resourced states.
South-east Asian economies, many of which depend on imported oil and gas, are among the most exposed, with domestic energy access and costs determined by foreign political interests and along shipping corridors where geopolitical risk is the permanent operating condition.
ASEAN has the resources and the technologies to end this dependency and secure its energy and economic sovereignty.
The region is endowed with extraordinary renewable potential: solar irradiance across mainland and island South-east Asia, geothermal resources in Indonesia and the Philippines, hydropower across the Mekong Basin and offshore wind corridors that have barely been touched.
For years, decarbonisation was framed as a cost: a moral imperative that required sacrifice today for safety tomorrow. That framing was always incomplete, but it is now simply wrong.
The dramatic collapse in the cost of solar, wind, batteries and associated technologies means that the most secure energy system and the most affordable energy system are, increasingly, the same system.
China understood early that a clean energy future is both an economic opportunity and an imperative for energy security. It led one of the most ambitious domestic energy security strategies in history, built on clean energy investment at an unrivalled scale and speed.
Its energy self-sufficiency now stands at 84.4 per cent, and its dependence on fossil fuels continues to decrease as a result of accelerated electric vehicle adoption, rapid electrification and the largest high-speed rail network in the world.
China’s investment in clean energy technology has not only accelerated its own energy transition but has also driven down costs so dramatically that renewables are now the most cost-effective way to meet virtually all new electricity demand.
ASEAN’s energy systems to date remain fragmented: Each country plans its own power systems, cross-border interconnection is slow and limited, and industrial strategies are mainly domestic and disconnected from energy system planning.
That fragmentation imposes enormous economic and strategic costs.
It leads to higher overall system costs, redundant generation and greater exposure to exactly the kind of shocks that the Hormuz closure represents.
It also forecloses the integrated regional value chains in critical minerals, manufacturing and clean technology that could make ASEAN industrially competitive in the energy transition.
What ASEAN has been missing is a genuinely regional energy architecture designed to capture the full value of the region’s diverse resource endowment.
Under Malaysia’s chairmanship of ASEAN in 2025, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim articulated the vision of having an integrated, reliable, sustainable regional energy system as a cornerstone of ASEAN unity and long-term competitiveness.
That vision is now being given serious analytical and political form, and it has a proper institutional home.
The ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE) is the region’s mandated technical body, officially charged with guiding its energy future.
For the first time, under the Philippines’ ASEAN chairmanship, ACE is developing an optimised, least-cost, integrated, decarbonised energy scenario for its forthcoming ASEAN Energy Outlook.
The premise is straightforward but consequential.
A connected grid allows surplus clean generation in one country to meet demand in another, improving energy access and reliability across the region and reducing overall investment needs and total system costs.
Shared transmission infrastructure, treated as a regional public good and financed collectively, can be built and operated in ways that share benefits and lower financing costs for all member states. Reliable access to clean energy enables macroeconomic stability and improves household welfare.
A secure, reliable and affordable energy system becomes the backbone of industrial upgrading, job creation and export growth.
Clean fuel corridors, mineral-to-manufacturing corridors and digital hubs anchor the integrated, clean energy systems on which they also depend: a feedback loop in which clean energy and industrial competitiveness reinforce each other.
Plans for an integrated energy system are not new in ASEAN, but the lesson of the past decade is that an integrated system cannot be created from the sum of incoherent parts.
It requires rigorous system-level modelling, robust economic analysis, modern industrial policies, a coherent investment sequencing plan and appropriate governance structures that respect national sovereignty while enabling genuine regional coordination.
A financing architecture grounded in principles of affordability and regional benefit, not on the basis of individual least-risk projects, will also be needed.
ACE exists precisely to provide the analytical and technical foundation that regional energy planning requires, centred in the region’s interest, at the scale the moment demands.
What has been absent, and must change, is for ACE to be fully supported by its member states in order for ACE to be genuinely ASEAN-owned and -led, rather than having to align portions of its mandate with the agendas of diverse external partners and donors.
Regional support guarantees ACE’s technical analysis and policy facilitation remain coherent and oriented entirely around regional interests.
In the interim, development partners must empower ACE to build the institutional capabilities it needs to lead this work, ensuring ACE has coordinated resourcing that strengthens ASEAN-led planning without duplicating analyses and efforts.
The geopolitics of this moment make the urgency plain.
A region that builds its energy system around its own renewable resources, connected by a shared grid, governed by shared institutions and financed through a shared architecture, is uniquely capable of setting its own terms: for its industries, its trade relationships, and its economic future.
The countries and regions already building their way out of fossil fuel dependency are learning, in real time, what strategic autonomy actually means.
ASEAN has everything it needs to join them.
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Lisa Sachs is the director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), a Center of Columbia Climate School at Columbia University; associate professor of professional practice at Columbia Climate School; and director of Columbia’s Master of Science in Climate Finance programme.
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Bradford Willis is a senior associate at CCSI. He has been supporting the ASEAN Centre for Energy to advance technical, policy and financing strategies to accelerate ASEAN’s integrated energy future.