For years, the energy transition was framed largely as an engineering problem. Build enough renewables, electrify transport, modernise grids and cut emissions.
Peter Wooders works on one of the hardest problems in that transition: how to decarbonise quickly without creating new economic and geopolitical vulnerabilities. His focus is the clean-energy supply chain, from solar panels and wind turbines to batteries, electric vehicles and critical minerals. He argues that the transition cannot be designed around climate targets alone. Countries also want factories, jobs, strategic resilience and greater control over where their energy technologies come from. That tension is now reshaping trade and industrial policy worldwide.
Wooders is Co-founder and Managing Director of the Geneva Platform for Resilient Value Chains, where he leads work on solar and wind supply chains. The platform examines how to scale clean-energy deployment while managing local manufacturing ambitions, concentrated supply and geopolitical tensions. Its work also spans critical minerals, including how countries can build more resilient supply chains and capture greater value from the transition.
This is a natural progression from a career spent moving between the technical, economic and political sides of energy. Trained as an engineer, Wooders began in technology research at British Gas. He then spent 15 years consulting on energy and environmental policy. His projects ranged from energy efficiency in Hungary to clean-air economics in Egypt and nuclear waste in the UK. His clients included the World Bank, EBRD and European Commission departments.
He subsequently took that analytical approach into international climate and energy policy. At the International Institute for Sustainable Development, he became Senior Director of Energy and led the Energy Programme. He also helped build the Global Subsidies Initiative, examining how government support can distort energy markets and obstruct the transition to cleaner energy.
Wooders’ work on fossil-fuel subsidies illustrates the approach that still runs through his thinking. Rather than treating energy policy as a simple choice between technologies, he examines the incentives, fiscal pressures and social consequences that make reform politically difficult. His research has also covered carbon markets, border carbon adjustments and trade in environmental goods.
That history matters because today’s clean-energy race presents the same problem in a new form. Governments want faster decarbonisation, but they also want domestic manufacturing, strategic autonomy and resilient supply chains. Peter Wooders brings those competing objectives into the same conversation. His work sits where the energy transition meets the realities of economic power.
