The fallout from the Iran war is likely to expedite the shift away from fossil fuels and make countries think differently about the role renewables can play in shoring up energy security, analysts told CNBC.

The Middle East crisis has severely disrupted oil exports through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, which typically carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas (LNG) and represents a key choke point for fertilizer trade.

It has shone a light on the extent to which the world remains deeply reliant on fragile fossil fuel trade routes, while surging oil and gas prices have rattled energy markets and triggered widespread inflation fears.

Asia’s reliance on imported energy means it now sits at the forefront of the global fossil fuel crisis, but supply disruptions are also hitting hard in Europe and Africa, where countries are responding to rising fuel costs and a considerable threat to food security.

The head of the International Energy Agency said the energy transition was moving “very strongly” before the Iran war began — but the fallout from the resulting energy shock means countries will likely direct even more investment toward clean energy sources.

“I expect one of the responses to this crisis will be [an] acceleration of renewables. Not only because they are helping to reduce the emissions but also, they are [a] homegrown domestic energy source,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said at the National Press Club in Australia’s capital on Monday.

Clean energy sources dominated new power installations last year, for example, with renewables accounting for 85% of all new global power capacity, Birol said, citing solar as a primary driver of this trend.

“It is amazing. Ten years ago, solar was a romantic story — but now solar is a business,” Birol said.

Fossil fuels, however, such as coal, oil and gas, continue to dominate the global energy mix, meeting around 80% of worldwide demand in 2023, according to the IEA.

“The Iran crisis accelerates the shift to renewables and electrification. High fossil prices drive switching, making already cheap electrotech even more competitive,” Sam Butler-Sloss, research manager at global energy think tank Ember, told CNBC by email.

“In the old fossil fuel world, energy security meant diversifying fuel supply. With electrotech, nations now have the tools to increasingly eliminate imported fuels altogether.”

Electrotech, which refers to solar, wind, batteries and electrified transport, heating and industry, became the world’s dominant engine of global energy growth last year, Ember found in an analysis published in December. This was led by China’s emergence as the world’s first so-called “electrostate.”

Butler-Sloss said electric vehicle adoption had already been rising fast across the world, particularly in Asia, and this crisis adds a further tailwind to that trend. He estimated that scaling up EVs could save importers more than $600 billion a year in oil imports, describing the switch as a “security superlever.”

“This is Asia’s Ukraine moment. In the same way Ukraine compelled Europe to cut gas dependency, Hormuz will push Asia to cut oil dependency – but with even cheaper technology available,” Butler-Sloss said.

Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, lead energy analyst for the Europe team at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), described the Iran war energy shock as “a wake-up call” for the European Union.

Spain serves as a prime example of how countries have been able to limit their exposure to fossil fuel price volatility, Jaller-Makarewicz said.

She noted that Spain’s government had come under heavy criticism following a catastrophic blackout last year, which some policymakers blamed on renewables, but that the country was now reaping the rewards from its investment in wind and solar technologies.

With Elon Musk’s xAI planning to build a massive, natural-gas burning power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, the state’s environmental authority has scheduled a board meeting for Tuesday — Election Day for the 2026 primaries — to decide whether to grant the company key permits.

The NAACP and other civil rights and environmental advocates tried to get the meeting delayed, arguing that it was being rushed and would conflict with some residents’ efforts to vote. The groups also said that by holding the meeting in Jackson, nearly 200 miles away from Southaven, those directly affected by the plant are impeded from attending.

“This is not only a civic duty conundrum, but an unnecessary financial burden to Black residents and individuals who live in low-income and other communities near the facility,” the NAACP wrote in a letter to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) that’s dated March 8, but was released publicly on Monday.

They asked that the hearing be rescheduled and moved to a site closer to the proposed facility.

The MDEQ denied the request on Monday, writing in a response to the NAACP that its permit board “regularly meets on the second Tuesday of each month, which has been the standard practice for decades,” and that the regulator, “considers matters on a statewide basis.” A copy of the letter was shared with CNBC.

The meeting is set to take place a little over a month after Musk merged xAI with SpaceX, his reusable rocket company, in a transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. Since starting xAI in 2023, Musk has tried to turn the AI company into an OpenAI competitor in the booming generative AI market.

Training and running AI models requires hefty amounts of compute and power, and rising utility bills have been partly blamed on the massive electricity consumption of new data centers. At a meeting last week with the White House, execs from tech companies, including xAI, signed non-binding pledges to supply their own power for their facilities.

So far, xAI has relied on its Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the Mississippi state line. In Southaven, a roughly 15 minute drive from Memphis, xAI is investing in the proposed power plant, and a large data center dubbed Macrohardrr.

Following the MDEQ’s response on Monday, the NAACP said in a statement that by having the hearing the morning of Election Day, three hours away from the community, “their actions speak volumes.”

“They’re trying to sneak xAI’s data center into the community’s backyard and they don’t care about the people living there,” the letter said.

In February, the NAACP filed a notice of intent to sue xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations in Southaven.

As CNBC previously reported, residents in the area say they’ve endured round-the-clock noise pollution, and are concerned about air quality and public health issues from xAI’s use of “temporary” natural gas-burning turbines. Research by scientists at the University of Tennessee found that xAI’s earlier turbine use added to air pollution woes in Greater Memphis.

At a public hearing on Feb. 17 in Southaven, about 200 residents turned out to implore state and local officials to deny xAI authorization to rapidly build out data and power infrastructure without greater transparency, community engagement and effective efforts to prevent noise and air pollution.

Physicians, parents, teachers and local officials spoke out at the hearing.

“We are slowly falling out of love with where we have decided to grow our family,” said Taylor Logsdon, a mother of three, citing pollutants, noise levels and negative health effects. “It’s no coincidence that this is happening now. And I feel it will only get worse.”

A recent investigation by Floodlight showed that xAI has been operating more than a dozen “temporary” turbines concurrently in Southaven, as it previously did in Memphis. The company has argued that the turbines did not require federal permits, but environmental compliance experts have disagreed.

Community pushback and regulatory requirements are among the factors driving Musk and other tech executives to explore the potential of data centers in space.

WATCH: SpaceX takes on xAI cash burn after merger

Countries across the globe are increasingly turning to a decades-old weather modification technique as part of a push to control when and where it rains.

Alongside the U.S. and China, which boasts the world’s largest weather modification program, France, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia are among a growing list of countries to have experimented with cloud seeding.

For many, the embrace of rain-making operations stems from the need to boost water supplies as global demand continues to rise amid the climate crisis.

Others have sought to use cloud seeding to disperse fog at airports, tackle air pollution, reduce hail damage or even to manipulate the weather for major events, such as the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Cloud seeding aims to improve a cloud’s ability to produce rain or snow by introducing tiny particles, usually silver iodide. The process is limited both in area and duration and, over time, is estimated to increase local precipitation by 5% to 15%.

The concept is not without controversy, however. Since first taking place in the 1940s, cloud seeding experiments have raised concern over potential environmental and ecological risks and stoked regional security tensions, with countries accusing each other of stealing rain.

Augustus Doricko, CEO of Rainmaker, a California-based cloud seeding company, said there are two dynamics at play that seem to be rekindling people’s interest in the technology — both in the U.S. and across the world.

“One is truly just circumstance, a lot of these countries and regions are suffering from more volatility in climate and precipitation patterns and their water supply, and so it’s leading them through necessity to be more creative than they were in the past,” Doricko told CNBC by telephone.

“Two, and I think this is like the real meat and potatoes of why Rainmaker got started, it’s because in the last few years there have been some fundamental breakthroughs in how to do measurements and attribution of cloud seeding effects.”

Despite an 80-year legacy, Doricko said interest in cloud seeding “really fell off” in the 1970s and 1980s because it had been difficult to accurately measure how much precipitation derived from cloud seeding deployments.

Recent technological improvements now make it possible to verify the success of these deployments in real time, Doricko said.

The company, which says it intends to arrest the aridification of the American West, has grown rapidly in recent months, from just 19 employees at the beginning of 2025 to 120 today, a trend that appears to underscore the booming interest in cloud seeding.

Yet, despite its name, Doricko said the company’s cloud seeding projects are mostly designed to make it snow.

“I misnamed the company it turns out, and ‘Snowmaker’ probably would have been more apt. It doesn’t sound as good for what it’s worth,” Doricko said.

He added: “I think that the most important thing for Rainmaker to do this season is just to make unambiguous evidence of manmade snow — and do it so often that it is undeniably a viable and scalable technology.”

Other U.S.-based cloud seeding companies include Weather Modification Inc. in North Dakota and North American Weather Consultants in Utah, although some U.S. states, such as Florida and Tennessee, have banned weather modification activities.

In terms of state-level support, China has reportedly backed its weather modification program with $2 billion between 2014 and 2021, while Saudi Arabia spent $256 million in 2022 to support the first year of its regional cloud seeding program.

Authorities in Iran reportedly sprayed clouds with chemicals over the Urmia lake basin late last year, seeking to boost rainfall to combat the country’s worst drought in decades.

Such projects are not always successful, however. Together with the Delhi government, a team at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur recently reported mixed results following a cloud seeding trial to tackle air pollution in India’s capital city.

The IIT said in a statement at the time that its attempt was “not completely successful” due to a lack of moisture in the air, before adding that there had been a measurable reduction in particulate matter following the experiment.

Diana Francis, head of the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences lab at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, said cloud seeding can “modestly enhance” precipitation in the right conditions.

“But it is incremental, not transformative, and works best as part of a broader water and air-quality strategy,” Francis told CNBC by email.

Cloud seeding operations might typically cost between $1 to $10 per hectare-meter of additional water, Francis said, noting that while this remains highly variable, it works out to be much cheaper than desalination.

There are also other key caveats to consider, such as a strong dependence on cloud microphysics (given cloud seeding only works on existing clouds), problems with attribution and potential geopolitical and legal issues regarding downwind impacts, Francis said.

Studies have shown no significant impact on either human health or the environment from previous silver iodide cloud seeding projects, according to the World Meteorological Organization, while further investigation is needed to assess downwind effects.

The U.N. weather agency has also acknowledged that significant challenges in public, social and local acceptance of rain-making operations remain widely evident.