The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Energy security is the uninterrupted availability of energy at a price society can bear, and its dimensions move separately: physical adequacy of supply, reliability of delivery, diversity of fuels and routes, affordability, and whether households and services have access at all. This page sets out how insecurity develops, how adequacy and access are measured, and which evidence the ministries, regulators and operators who hold the decisions use.
GCRI · Established · service level R0
Energy security is the uninterrupted availability of energy at a price society can bear. Its dimensions move separately: physical adequacy of supply, reliability of delivery, diversity of fuels and routes, affordability and access. Adequacy is assessed probabilistically, so it is reported as expected unserved energy or loss of load expectation rather than as a single index.
Where demand concentrates in cities and the rail, road and port corridors that move fuel and equipment, shown for China as an example geography for this subject.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Supply adequacy, access and reliability. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
A system is adequate when available capacity, storage, demand response and imports meet demand with an accepted risk of shortfall. Adequacy is stated as an expected loss of load, not a yes or no, and it depends on weather, plant outages and imports failing together.
Dependence on one fuel, one supplier, one pipeline or one shipping strait turns a distant disruption into a domestic shortage. Diversity of sources and routes, and the stocks held in reserve, decide how far the shock travels.
A supply disruption appears first as a spike in wholesale fuel and power prices, then in household bills, industrial costs, subsidy budgets and the balance of payments. Affordability failures can cut access as surely as a physical shortfall.
Where households lack electricity or clean cooking, clinics, water pumping and schools depend on fuel deliveries and small generators. Insecurity there is chronic rather than episodic, and it compounds every other hazard that arrives.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Loss of load expectation | The expected number of hours or days in a period when supply cannot meet demand, a standard adequacy measure. |
| Expected unserved energy | The expected amount of demand, in energy terms, that a power system cannot supply over a period. |
| Emergency oil stocks | Oil held by governments or obliged industry for release in a supply disruption, required of IEA members at ninety days of net imports. |
| Supplier concentration | How far a country's imports of a fuel come from few suppliers, measured with indices such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman index. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expected unserved energy | megawatt hours per year | annual planning cycle | Probabilistic adequacy assessment | MODELLED |
| Loss of load expectation | hours per year | annual planning cycle | Probabilistic adequacy assessment | MODELLED |
| Net energy import dependence | percent of total energy supply | annual | National energy balances | OFFICIAL |
| Supplier concentration index | dimensionless (Herfindahl-Hirschman) | annual | Trade statistics by fuel and origin | ESTIMATED |
| Emergency oil stocks | days of net imports | monthly | Stockholding agency reports | OFFICIAL |
| Gas storage fill level | percent of working gas capacity | daily | Storage operator reporting | REPORTED |
| Access to electricity | percent of population | annual | Household surveys and utility records | ESTIMATED |
| Access to clean cooking | percent of population | annual | Household surveys and WHO modelling | MODELLED |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| IEA World Energy Balances | Supply, transformation and final consumption by fuel and country | Licensed; selected tables free under IEA terms |
| UN Energy Statistics Database (UNSD) | Production, trade and consumption of energy commodities by country | Free access, UN terms |
| JODI Oil and JODI Gas | Monthly production, trade, stocks and demand reported by national administrations | Free, attribution |
| GIE AGSI+ and ALSI | Daily gas storage and LNG terminal levels in Europe | Free, registration and terms |
| Tracking SDG7 (IEA, IRENA, UNSD, World Bank, WHO) | Access, renewables, efficiency and finance indicators for every country | Free and open, attribution |
| ENTSO-E European Resource Adequacy Assessment | Probabilistic adequacy methods and results for the European system | Public report, ENTSO-E terms |
| NERC long-term and seasonal reliability assessments | Resource adequacy and risk areas across North America | Public reports |
| EIA international energy data | Production, consumption, trade and reserves by country | Public domain |
Energy Nexus prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Energy ministries | Whether supply is adequate for the coming winter and summer, and what reserves or contracts to secure | Probabilistic adequacy with its assumptions; storage and stock levels against obligations |
| Energy regulators | Whether the reliability standard is set at the right level and whether market rules deliver it | Expected unserved energy against the standard; the value of lost load behind it |
| Transmission system operators | Which resources to procure for reserve and when to declare scarcity | Seasonal outlooks, interconnector availability and planned outages |
| Development finance institutions | Where access investment protects health and water services first | Access gap layers with survey and model estimates labelled apart |
Dependence on one pipeline, import terminal, fuel type or supplier means one disruption removes a large share of supply.
Cold snaps raise demand while reducing wind, solar or gas deliverability, so stress arrives on both sides of the balance at once.
Power plants, networks and fuel infrastructure take years to build, so shortfalls identified late cannot be fixed quickly.
Models simulate many weather years and random outages to estimate the expected frequency and depth of unserved energy. Results depend on the weather record used and on assumptions about imports and demand flexibility.
Engineers test whether the system survives the loss of any single major element. This captures ordinary faults well but not extreme, simultaneous events.
Measures of concentration across fuels, routes and suppliers. They describe exposure, not the likelihood of disruption.
Designed combinations of extremes, built with forecasting and optimization methods. Scenarios test assumptions; they are not predictions.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.