The real cost of Italy’s energy crisis is hitting young people We shouldn’t be worrying about cancelled flights, but our wages

Every year, on April 22, there is a tradition of celebrating our planet. But 2026 has been a particularly unstable year for our relationship with Earth: on one hand, the Artemis II astronauts showed us just how beautiful we look from lunar orbit, while on the other we are living through one of the most severe energy crises of the post-industrial era. It took the risk of summer holidays being cancelled for energy dependency to become a topic “buzz-worthy” enough to finally be discussed both in politics and among younger generations. Because a cancelled flight is only a minor, temporary and solvable consequence, while the impact of energy dependency in Italy on the wages of under-30s is, de facto, one of the main pain points for Gen Z. We spoke to an expert in the field and a Research Fellow in Environmental Policy at Columbia University to better understand the issue.

Where does Italy stand with renewable energy?

Italy is one of the European countries most dependent on external energy sources: according to Eurostat data, we import over 70% of the energy we consume, compared to a European average of around 55–60%. This means that more than half of our daily life, from heating to manufacturing to the food we eat, depends on dynamics that take place beyond our borders.

When those dynamics break down, we all notice it at once, even if always with a slight delay. The Strait of Hormuz is just the latest reminder, not because the energy we use at home passes directly through it, but because roughly one fifth of the world’s oil flows through it. And in a market where oil and gas act as substitutes, it only takes one to move for the entire system to start fluctuating. Our source explained that the issue is not so much “where energy comes from,” but how exposed we are to what happens outside. In Italy today, only one watt out of five comes from renewables, while everything else, between direct imports and fossil fuels, remains tied to an extremely fragile international balance.

We changed suppliers, not the system

As Di Capua points out, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, “we told ourselves” we were becoming more independent, when in reality we carried out a much simpler operation—we replaced Russia with other countries such as Algeria, Azerbaijan and Norway: “this is what is called ‘diversification’, and it has been sold as a strategy for security”.

Diversifying does not mean becoming independent, it simply means spreading the risk, staying within the same system but with more actors involved. But when many of those actors are located in regions of the world that are far from stable, in times of global crisis they can reduce supply and push prices up almost immediately—as has happened with the Strait of Hormuz. What is rarely said is that this dependency comes with a constant cost, not just when a crisis erupts: “it’s a kind of geopolitical interest we pay every day,” the researcher points out. Because every increase in energy prices automatically translates into higher transport costs, consumer goods, rent and services, directly impacting the cost of living.

The real impact of the energy crisis is on wages

At a certain point, this stops being a story about energy and becomes a story about money. Because if you live in a country like Italy, where a legal minimum wage does not exist and where, according to the OECD, real wages are among the few in Europe to have remained essentially stagnant over the past thirty years, every external shock hits much harder.

It is almost mathematical, yet it is rarely framed this way: if energy costs rise, then transport, bills, production and groceries rise as well, while wages stay the same. Not in a spectacular way, not through a sudden collapse, but through a slow erosion that builds month after month, year after year, until Gen Z at 30 still cannot be financially independent. It is no coincidence that, according to a recent International Monetary Fund report, Italy is expected to be the G20 country with the lowest GDP growth in 2026, at just +0.50% year-on-year.

Eurostat reports that in recent years energy inflation has been one of the main drivers behind the rising cost of living in Europe, with peaks exceeding 40% at the height of the 2022 crisis, effects that are still reflected in prices today. In Italy, this impact has been even more pronounced because we start from a more fragile position: higher external dependency, weaker wage growth and less capacity to absorb shocks. As a result, every energy crisis becomes a crisis of disposable income: as the source points out, “it happened in 2008, then in 2014 with Crimea, then in 2020 with the pandemic, and again now”. Each time, we lose a bit of purchasing power—and we never fully get it back, if we ever will.