The case for islands’ energy vulnerability: Electricity supply diversity in 44 global islands

Alexis Ioannidis, Konstantinos J. Chalvatzis, Xin Li, Gilles Notton and Phedeas Stephanides

Renewable Energy, 2019, vol. 143, issue C, 440-452

Abstract: Energy supply security is a multifaceted challenge for all countries and especially for small island nations that might have limited adaptive capacity. Previous studies showed that islands experience energy scarcity and isolation from energy markets due to their remote location making energy supply security a challenging issue. We estimate energy supply diversity and concentration for 44 islands in order to provide an island specific benchmark approach for energy supply security. We use established metrics Shannon-Wiener index (SWI), Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) with Energy Information Administration (EIA) fuel mix data. To confront the issues of supply security and sustainability we test energy diversity against energy and emissions intensity. The global character of the research along with the wide range of islands covered allows useful comparisons between countries and for a means of benchmarking against the indices while creating certain defined country clusters. Overall it is found that average island energy intensity increased by 23.4% with a corresponding increase of 12.4% on their emissions intensity for the period 2000–2015. On the other hand, diversity has improved by 21.3% (SWI) and by 2% (HHI) since 2000. We argue that fossil-fuel lock-in for islands must break in order to UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 to be achieved particularly for vulnerable island nations.

Keywords: Energy security; Global islands; Diversity; Security; Carbon emissions; Benchmarking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148119306391
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:143:y:2019:i:c:p:440-452

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2019.04.155

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().