Briefing on Energy, Security and Geopolitics with Max Gruenig- New York, NY

Recent geopolitical events have drawn attention to the need for energy security, while continuing the pathway to de-carbonisation of the energy system. While the Ukrainian crisis revolves to a large degree around European energy supply with Russian natural gas, the global policy community is also facing continuous pressure through extended droughts and extreme weather events, which reaffirms the necessity to mitigate climate change. Scholars have suggested that we are entering a ‘new’ energy world order, in which a country’s energy surplus (or deficit) strongly contributes to determine national position in the global world-system. Nowhere is the energy supply/geopolitical tension unfolding quite like between Russia and Europe today, with serious political, economic, and environmental implications for the rest of the world.

This presentation draws on the results of the MILESECURE-2050 project, funded in part by the European Commission’s Directorate General of Research and Innovation (2013-2015). The project brings a socioeconomic perspective to low-carbon energy security and geopolitics in Europe. The focus is on four overarching thematic clusters: 1) Challenging the energy security paradigm; 2) Climate change and energy security objectives; 3) energy security from a geopolitical perspective as it relates to economics, resource competition, and availability; and 4) how large renewable energy projects and distributed renewable energy may influence energy security and social acceptance.  An overarching narrative is that optimizing the energy system simultaneously across these different objectives may well be impossible.

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