The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Energy systems science studies how societies produce, convert, transmit, store and use energy, and how reliably they do it. It joins power engineering, thermodynamics, materials science, economics and operations research. The field matters because almost every essential service depends on energy delivered continuously, and because the systems that deliver it are changing faster now than at any time since they were built. This page defines the field, what experts study in it and how it connects to other risks; Energy Nexus home links to the topics.
Risk fieldWhere systemic stress concentrates across the areas GCRI works in. Illustrative levels, not findings.
The Energy Nexus field covers energy systems, transitions, reliability and cross-sector dependencies that sustain society. Experts in it study questions such as energy security and power grids and interconnection, with methods such as energy generation, storage and grid technology as well as power systems engineering. Its counterparts at GRF and GRA look at the same systems through governance and finance.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
The field covers the whole chain: primary resources such as fuels, wind, sunlight, water and uranium; conversion in power stations, refineries and boilers; transport through pipelines, shipping and electricity networks; storage in tanks, reservoirs, batteries and heat stores; and end use in buildings, industry and transport. Electricity is the most demanding part because supply and demand must balance continuously and disturbances propagate at close to the speed of light.
Experts distinguish adequacy (enough capacity and energy to meet demand over time) from security (the ability to withstand sudden disturbances) and resilience (the ability to absorb, adapt to and recover from events beyond design assumptions). A system can be adequate on paper and still insecure in operation, or secure against ordinary faults and fragile against prolonged extremes.
Frequency, voltage and inertia, protection systems and how power electronics change system behaviour.
Probabilistic assessment of whether future systems can meet demand under weather and outage uncertainty.
Heat, drought, wind, flood and wildfire effects on generation, networks and demand.
Who is exposed to outages and price shocks, and who bears the cost of reliability.
A widespread outage stops water pumping, interrupts telecommunications, closes payment systems and forces hospitals onto backup generation with limited fuel. Fuel supply disruptions reach freight, food distribution and emergency services. These links run both ways: grids need telecommunications for control and water for cooling. Dependencies and consequences sets out these links in detail.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Grid resilience | A power system's ability to withstand, absorb and recover from high-impact events such as storms, heat waves and cyberattacks. |
| Black start | Restarting a power system after a total or partial shutdown using generators that can start without external electricity. |
| Interconnection | Transmission links between power systems or countries that let them share reserves and trade power, and also share disturbances. |
| Systemic risk | Risk arising from the interactions and dependencies within and between systems, where a shock can propagate and threaten the functioning of the whole. |
Within GCRI, energy science works alongside Water Nexus on cooling water and hydropower, Critical Infrastructure on interdependent networks, and Data and Compute on the growing electricity demand of computing. The Critical infrastructure field gateway and the Climate and hazards field gateway show the wider picture.
The governance of energy crises is convened at Disaster and Crisis Governance by The Global Risks Forum (GRF). How energy risk reaches lenders, insurers and investors is the subject of The Global Risks Alliance (GRA) platforms, including Climate and Nature Financial Risk.
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.