The Green Grid’s Hidden Backdoor: Who Controls Europe's Clean Energy?

BusinessEnergyThe Green Grid’s Hidden Backdoor: Who Controls Europe's Clean Energy?ByKen Silverstein,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Ken Silverstein analyzes the Energy Transition, AI and GeopoliticsFollow AuthorJun 01, 2026, 09:00am EDTRussian flag displayed on a laptop screen, Guy Fawkes mask and binary code displayed on a screen are seen in this multiple exposure illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on March 1, 2022. Global hacker group Anonymous declared 'cyber war' against Russia. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)NurPhoto via Getty ImagesThe clean energy revolution has a hidden vulnerability: the software running it answers to someone else.On April 1, Vietnam did something no government had done before. When it licensed Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network to operate in the country, Hanoi buried a condition in the fine print: all data traffic must route through four domestically controlled gateway stations on Vietnamese soil. No foreign server would touch Vietnamese data without Vietnamese eyes on it first. The announcement drew a few tech headlines and quickly faded.It shouldn't have. Because Vietnam just wrote the playbook for the most consequential fight in the global energy transition—and almost no one noticed.The green energy revolution is not simply a story about solar panels and wind turbines displacing coal and gas. It is increasingly a story about who controls the software, algorithms, and data infrastructure that power those systems. And for much of the world, the answer is: someone else.Clean energy is now a matter of national defense, and the software running the grid matters just as much as the hardware. The crisis is that while governments physically sit on the hardware, foreign powers or outside tech giants increasingly control the software."Europe has effectively surrendered remote control of a vast portion of its electricity infrastr...