The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Energy systems are both a dependency and a dependant. Water, health, finance, telecommunications and food systems need energy; energy systems need water for cooling, telecommunications for control, materials from global supply chains and skilled people to run them. This page sets out the causal, physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them. It complements the field overview and the topic on grid disruption and recovery.
Dependencies and consequences in Energy Nexus describe how energy, critical infrastructure, and climate and hazards connect to other systems through physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them toward fields such as those of Diplomacy Nexus and Climate and Nature Governance. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; it describes connections, not a forecast.
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.
Thermal and nuclear plants need cooling water; hydropower needs river flow; water utilities need electricity to treat and pump.
Grid control, market operation and field crews rely on communications networks that themselves need power and backup batteries.
Large, concentrated loads that need very high reliability and can affect local network planning.
Transformers, cables, turbines and batteries depend on long supply chains and critical minerals with long replacement lead times.
Energy production changes the environment through emissions, land use, water abstraction and thermal discharges. The environment in turn constrains energy: warm rivers limit cooling, drought limits hydropower, wildfire threatens lines and vegetation management near lines is itself an ecological question.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interdependency | A two-way dependency between infrastructures, such as power needing telecoms for control while telecoms need power to run. |
| Cascading risk | Risk that a failure in one system or component triggers failures in others that depend on it. |
| Compound event | Two or more hazards or drivers occurring together or in sequence whose joint impact exceeds what either would cause alone, such as drought followed by intense rain; IPCC assessments use the term. |
| Dependency mapping | Tracing the people, processes, technology, facilities and suppliers a service relies on. |
One hazard, such as a heatwave, degrades generation, networks and demand at the same time, defeating redundancy that assumed independent failures.
Outages disable telecommunications and fuel pumping that crews need for restoration, lengthening the outage.
Single substations, pipelines or ports that serve many users create points where one failure has wide reach.
Dependency analysis uses network science and contagion and reliability and resilience engineering. Every map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty.
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.