Linking geoeconomic and financial de-risking in European energy infrastructure

The greening of the EU’s energy infrastructure has increasingly been framed as a solution to reduce strategic fossil dependencies. Yet this process is embedded in new geoeconomic competition. We ask how geoeconomic pressures influence the EU’s strategies for greening its energy infrastructure. We argue that the EU, against the backdrop of a highly financialized political economy, pursues a two-pronged ‘de-risking’ approach: ‘geoeconomic de-risking’, aiming to control value chains and transnational infrastructures, and ‘financial de-risking’, minimizing investment risks for private capital. Financial de-risking serves to mobilize resources to implement geoeconomic de-risking objectives. Combining these previously isolated concepts, we analyze EU policy across three infrastructure areas: solar and wind energy, electricity transmission, and hydrogen. We show that heightened crisis perceptions intensified the interaction of both forms of de-risking. Nevertheless, the double de-risking approach entails limitations and long-term consequences, as it increases the influence of private capital, benefits fossil actors, and socializes risks.