CS26: Global Energy Security

The issue of energy security is central to sub-Saharan African countries where majority of the people lack access to electricity and clean cooking fuel. Access to affordable modern energy sources continue to be a challenge in the region. While about 600 million people do not have access to electricity, over 5 billion still rely on biomass for cooking. Therefore, exploring the trend of energy security and its enablers is very important to understand energy security dynamics in the region. This study carried out a principal component analysis to examine the dynamics of energy security for 23 countries in SSA for the period 2000 – 2021. The overall findings suggest that the composite energy security index of the selected countries in SSA has been trending upwards, indicating a significant improvement. However, remarkable variations exist amongst the regions and the selected countries. While some countries such as South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Equatoria Guinea, Gabon, Senegal and Ghana have over the years achieved significant improvement in their energy security, others such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Niger, Congo Republic and Benin have not exhibited significant improvement in the energy security. We found that carbon intensity, energy use and electricity power consumption have higher impact on energy security index. followed by energy intensity, renewable electricity output and power distribution and transmission losses as well as energy import, governance and GDP growth.
Policy intervention should aim at addressing the key challenges affecting energy security in the region such as reducing losses associated with electricity power generation and distribution and increasing the share of renewable energy in the energy mix. Additionally, countries could learn best practices from their peers in the region to improve energy security.

Economic intelligence is increasingly used by States to safeguard energy security. The dominant approach is focused on understanding how to protect critical assets from potential threats (e.g. cyber-attacks) through economic intelligence activities. The approach is mainly based on the perspective of specific firms. This paper proposes a novel approach to energy security, based on a long-term and systemic vision of the role of critical economic assets. The concept of energy security proposed is one that is not only defensive, but also based on foreign projection through deployment and strategy-oriented management of critical assets. It applies the fundamental principle of geopolitics that 'long-term security is pursued far from the national borders', and that pursuing it domestically reveals a state of emergency or weakness that should be avoided.

This article examines how energy security is conceptualized in the literature on European electricity market integration following the establishment of the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) in 2011. Electricity market integration has expanded substantially, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) has developed clear definitions and frameworks for electricity security. Electricity security is here understood as the capability of the system to ensure uninterrupted availability of electricity by withstanding and recovering from disturbances and contingencies (IEA, 2021). However, less attention has been paid to how different aspects of energy security are framed in the academic literature on European electricity market integration.

Drawing on the established 4As framework of energy security – availability, accessibility, affordability, and acceptability – rooted in Deese (1979) and Yergin (1988), and further developed and extended by Baldwin (1997) and Cherp and Jewell (2014), the guiding research question in this study is: How is energy security conceptualized in the literature on European electricity market integration? 





References:

Baldwin, D. A. (1997). The concept of security. Review of International Studies, 23(1), 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210597000053

Cherp, A., & Jewell, J. (2014). The concept of energy security: Beyond the four As. Energy Policy, 75, 415–421. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2014.09.005

International Energy Agency (2021). Analytical frameworks for electricity security 2021. 
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2021/04/analytical-frameworks-for-electricity-security_b1a9bc1f/899a38f9-en.pdf

Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2015). Qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation (Fourth edition.). Wiley.

Schreier, M. (2012). Qualitative content analysis in practice. SAGE.
 Yergin, D. (1988). Energy security in the 1990s. Foreign Affairs, 67(1), 110–132. https://doi.org/10.2307/20043677

Europe's energy supply risks have historically been driven by dependence on imported fossil fuels. While the expansion of clean energy technologies reduces parts of this exposure, it simultaneously introduces new dependencies on critical raw materials, making it essential to understand how supply risks evolve across commodities in decarbonizing energy systems.
The core objective of this paper is to design a supply risk budget allocation framework to analyze how supply risk has evolved across commodities in the past and how it may be allocated in future energy systems. Accordingly, the following research questions are answered in this paper:
How can a supply risk budget be designed to capture both stock and flow commodities across relevant supply chain steps?How can the European supply risk budget be allocated across energy supply options?What are the implications of imposing hard supply risk budget constraints on European technology transformation pathways?To address these questions, we develop a conceptual framework to quantify commodity-specific supply risk and derive a European supply risk budget. The framework is first applied to historical years for calibration and validation. We then extend a European energy system optimization model to assess future supply risk in 2030, 2040, and 2050. The model minimizes total system costs while meeting electricity demand and incorporates four key features: (i) country-level commodity markets for coal, LNG, uranium, copper, and cobalt; (ii) explicit import pathways from major exporters; (iii) supply risk quantification based on the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index weighted by World Governance Indicators; and (iv) a supply risk budget constraint that distributes geopolitical supply risk exposure across both stock and flow commodities.
Results show a structural shift from fossil fuel–dominated supply risks toward increasing material-related vulnerabilities in net-zero energy systems.