Electrification as Energy Security: What the IEA's 2026 Report Means for Singapore?

Electrification just became a national security strategy, not just a climate one

Singapore imports 98% of its energy. So when the International Energy Agency put a number on what faster electrification does to a country's energy import bill, it wasn't publishing a climate paper. It was publishing a national security paper and Singapore happens to sit exactly where that math matters most.

The number: fuel-importing countries that accelerate electrification could cut their annual energy import bills by roughly 25% by 2035, or about USD 400 billion a year, more like USD 500 billion at the energy prices the Strait of Hormuz crisis has produced in 2026. That's not a projection built on best-case renewables adoption. It's built on technology and pricing that already exist today.

Figure 1. Avoided import bill from end-use electrification in the HES in 2035 as a share of the 2025 import bill, by net-importing region

Source: IEA (2026), Special Report on Electrification, Figure 4.3, IEA, Paris. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The oil math nobody's discounting anymore

Here's the figure that should reframe how fleet operators and policymakers think about EV adoption: fuel-importing countries could cut their oil imports by 15 million barrels a day by 2035, mostly on the back of transport electrification. The IEA attributes this reduction almost entirely to EVs displacing fuel-importing regions' reliance on foreign oil. That's the number that matters for the energy-security argument, since it isolates exactly the dependence Singapore and other import-reliant economies are trying to shed.

Figure 2. Avoided fuel imports resulting from electrification of end-uses by region in the HES in 2035 compared to 2025

Notes: AE = advanced economies; EMDE = emerging market and developing economies. Includes all countries/regions that were net importers of oil, natural gas or coal in 2025. Avoided imports reflect reductions in direct fossil fuel use from end-use electrification over 2025–2035; they do not incorporate assumptions on the electricity generation mix.

Source: IEA (2026), Special Report on Electrification, Figure 4.2, IEA, Paris. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Zoom out to the global picture and the number is larger still. Across all countries, including oil exporters whose own domestic demand also falls as EVs spread, total global oil demand avoided under the IEA's faster-electrification scenario reaches 18 million barrels a day by 2035, roughly equivalent to Russia's entire oil production. The gap between the two figures is the exporting world's own consumption drop, which doesn't show up as an "avoided import" but is still real oil that never gets burned.

For an import-dependent economy like Singapore, it's the 15 mb/d import-reduction figure that's directly relevant. Every barrel in that number is a barrel a fuel-importing country no longer has to buy on a market that spikes with geopolitics like this year's Strait of Hormuz crisis.

Figure 3. Avoided imports resulting from end-use electrification by fuel and sector in the HES by 2035 compared to 2025

Note: mb/d = million barrels per day; bcm = billion cubic metres; Mtce = million tonnes of coal equivalent.

Source: IEA (2026), Special Report on Electrification, Figure 4.1, IEA, Paris. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

This is the detail that gets lost when EV adoption gets framed purely as an emissions story: for an import-dependent economy, every EV on the road is a small, permanent subtraction from a bill that fluctuates with geopolitics you don't control. A diesel fleet vehicle ties its operating cost to whatever the Strait of Hormuz is doing this quarter. An electrified one doesn't.

Why the 33%-to-35% gap matters more than it sounds

The IEA's special report, commissioned by Türkiye and Australia to inform COP31 negotiations, models a global electrification target of 35% of final energy consumption by 2035, up from 23% today. Using only technology and pricing available right now, the world could hit roughly 33% cost-effectively. That's "striking distance," in the report's own words. It's also a signal that the constraint isn't technology anymore. It's deployment speed, grids, charging infrastructure, and policy coordination.

Figure 4. Global consumption of final and useful energy by product and share of electricity in final energy, useful energy and GDP, 2025

Notes: EJ = exajoule. Useful energy can be higher than final energy for electricity as heat pumps and air conditioners transfer energy to and from the environment, resulting in efficiencies above 100% for those technologies. "Final energy" (green bars) is the raw amount of energy delivered to the point of use, like the fuel that goes into a car's tank or the electricity that reaches a wall socket. "Useful energy" (dark blue bars) is what's left after accounting for how efficiently that energy actually gets converted into something useful, like motion, heat, or light.

Source: IEA (2026), Special Report on Electrification, Figure 1.3, IEA, Paris. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

That reframing matters for anyone running fleet, condo, or government charging infrastructure in Singapore: the economics have already cleared the bar. What hasn't cleared is the buildout. IEA modeling shows solar additions need to roughly double globally, wind additions need to jump 2.5x, and battery storage capacity needs to grow nearly tenfold by 2035 to support this pace of electrification. Grid expansion needs to run 40% faster than it did over the past decade. None of that is a Singapore-specific constraint, it's the same bottleneck everywhere, which is exactly why infrastructure operators who move early capture a structural advantage over ones who wait for the market to mature around them.

The caveat most coverage skips

Faster electrification cuts end-use emissions, transport, buildings, industry, by an estimated 40% by 2035 under the IEA's accelerated scenario. But the report is explicit about something most summaries leave out: electricity generation emissions haven't peaked yet, even with renewables growing. Electrification without a parallel shift in how that electricity gets generated doesn't eliminate emissions. It relocates them upstream, to the power plant.

Figure 5. Avoided imports from end-use electrification in the HES and by electricity supply case in 2035

Notes: STEPS = Stated Policies Scenario; CPS = Current Policies Scenario; NZE = Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario; elec. = electrification. Includes all countries/regions that were net importers of oil, natural gas or coal in 2025.

Source: IEA (2026), Special Report on Electrification, Figure 4.4, IEA, Paris. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

That's not an argument against electrification. It's an argument for reading it correctly: EV adoption is a security and cost hedge with near-certain payoff, and a climate lever whose payoff depends on what's happening on the grid feeding it. Two different claims, both true, and conflating them is how "electrification = solved" narratives end up overpromising.

What this means if you're deciding right now

For a fleet manager weighing a transition timeline, the security argument is the one immune to oil-price volatility, it holds regardless of what generation mix eventually decarbonizes the grid. For a household cross-shopping an EV, it's a version of the same logic at a smaller scale: an electric v ehicle's running cost stops tracking a global commodity market the moment you plug in.

Figure 6. Global household energy bills and annual investments in electrified technologies and efficiency by households in the STEPS and HES, 2025-2035

Notes: MER = market exchange rate. STEPS = Stated Policies Scenario, reflecting today's announced policy settings without additional acceleration. HES = High Electrification Scenario, the IEA's faster-electrification pathway modeled for this report, reaching the 35% electrification target by 2035. Other includes natural gas, district heat, coal and renewables.

Source: IEA (2026), Special Report on Electrification, Figure 4.22, IEA, Paris. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The open question isn't whether electrification is worth it economically, the IEA's own numbers already answer that. It's whether Singapore's charging infrastructure and grid capacity keep pace with a demand curve that's now backed by both climate policy and energy security logic pulling in the same direction.

See how the total cost of ownership shifts for your own vehicle or fleet with World Mobility Forum's Calculator, or check real-world charging speed and range data on EV Specs.

IEA (2026), Electrification, IEA, Paris. https://www.iea.org/reports/electrification. Licence: CC BY 4.0.