Analytical Frameworks for Electricity Security

Given the salient role that electricity plays in modern economies, the task of ensuring electricity security is a top priority for policy makers. The process is an extensive and complicated one that involves careful consideration of costs and benefits. This chapter summarises the steps involved in developing a framework for electricity security. It defines outages, describes approaches to assessing how much they cost, and outlines the institutional responsibilities to prevent and/or react to them. In doing so, it lays out the existing approaches available to policy makers and the challenges they face in creating electricity security frameworks, including clarifying the costs and benefits, establishing reliability planning structures, and assigning institutional responsibility for various tasks. It then previews how policy makers and other stakeholders need to adapt frameworks for electricity security in the face of major trends affecting the sector – namely, the clean energy transition, cyberthreats and climate change.