Energy continues to draw considerable attention from citizens and governments across the globe in both industrialised and developing countries. Many nations are concerned with the continuity of energy supply to ensure that the needs of their economies, businesses and households are fully served. To this end, governments form their national energy policies, and energy security often becomes an integral part of these policies and remains an ongoing concern. What exactly is the nature of this concern? How do governments address energy security concerns? These questions have formed a foundation for this book and also induced the authors to look at the critical factors that underpin government energy policy and actions.

When governments talk about energy security, are governments concerned about the right thing? The reason behind this question is that, in many nations, the existing focus on uninterruptible energy supply does not properly address the core of energy security. Governments often focus their attentions on building supply chains that they perceive as being reliable, based on their political preferences, and to the contracts that might deliver the required volume of energy resources to a country. However, in the modern, turbulent world, supply chains and contracts are subject to considerable power struggles between nations: all kinds of disruptions and renegotiation take place. Fundamentally, supply chains and contracts normally serve the nation’s needs in the short and medium terms, rather than the long-term. Within a longer time frame, considering the fact that governments and political regimes change, and the depletion of fossil fuels accelerates, a certain country, particularly one that is resource-poor, will have to continuously deal with its dependency on other nations for the supply of energy resources. Therefore, short- and medium-term security is likely to result in energy insecurity in the long run. Naturally, many nations are concerned with this prospect and are looking for options to remedy the situation. But what are the solutions?

This book discusses the past and current approaches to energy security and offers a novel understanding, which focuses on long-term sustainability. The book investigates energy security from two interrelated perspectives—the increased utilisation of renewable energy sources (RES) and resource use efficiency. In this book, the term resource efficiency is used to mean deriving the most value from resource inputs (related to energy production), and incorporates energy efficiency, while materials efficiency is beyond the scope of the book.

These dimensions apply equally to resource-rich and resource-poor economies as all nations are interested in sustainable development, including economic durability, advancement of human capital and a cleaner environment. The focus on renewable energy and resource efficiency addresses all elements of sustainability, and the book argues that these dimensions should be incorporated into a nations’ energy policies and governance. Furthermore, the book shows a range of examples, from various countries, of how governments foster renewable energy generation and complement it with programmes and tools that enhance resource use efficiency. To summarise, the book’s purpose is to investigate the enablers, policy approaches, governance issues and management problems related to the reduction of dependency on fossil fuels and to highlight the experience of selected economies in implementing resource efficiency programmes. As for resource-rich countries, they often experience path dependency: they keep buying energy sources, while missing out on the opportunity to utilise renewables and increase resource use efficiency. This is why this book should appeal to readers from most nations, rather than just resource-rich countries.

In the context of the increasing significance of renewables, the book examines the following questions:

This book is non-technical. Rather, it looks at energy and related issues through the lens of policy and governance. Although affordable and technologically advanced solutions are necessary and will naturally form the basis for the promotion of renewables and efficient use of energy resources, often the focus on technology does not produce the required policy results. Having good technological and engineering solutions is just not enough. Each policy has to be supported by organised actors, institutions, tools, funding, procedures and mechanisms (i.e. governance) to ensure successful implementation.

The book’s principal argument is that enhancing energy security requires a new approach in policy and governance, which integrates two core components: the emphasis on increasing energy production from renewable sources and resource use efficiency. This notion contrasts with the traditional understanding of energy security as security of supply, which inevitably focuses on the availability of fossil fuels and reinforces the economy’s dependency on finite resources. The experience of resource-rich nations, such as Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE shows that vested interests related to the established oil and gas sector serve as a principal impediment to the use of renewable energy. Despite the growing environmental concerns and the adoption of clean energy policies, e.g. in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, resource-rich economies are lacking in progress in terms of exploiting their renewable energy sources. By offering conceptual chapters and making use of case studies of specific resource efficiency programmes, this book argues that there should be a shift in a nations’ energy policy. Governments should adopt a long-term perspective and an approach that focuses on two tasks: renewable energy (i.e. the promotion of increased production and consumption of energy from renewable sources) and resource efficiency (e.g. energy saving measures, government support to the development of resource efficient technology, design of smart grids and deployment of community-level microgrids). In the light of reducing deposits of fossil fuels, in the long run, only this approach will enable nations to secure resources that can meet their energy needs. It is worth noting that energy supply will remain part of energy security as long as a nation uses fossil fuels; however, fossil fuels should be a shrinking part of the nation’s energy mix.

By adopting a new concept of energy security, both resource-rich and resource-poor nations need to gradually reduce their dependency on fossil fuels. While many countries are aware of this need, they just disregard it, driven by the short-term considerations, vested interests of the companies engaged in the fossil fuels contracts and imperfections in the legal and governance frameworks. Although the concept of energy security is often used in political rhetoric, in reality not many nations truly focus on renewables and resource use efficiency. Therefore, the book’s objective is to emphasise the need to move from rhetoric to policy adoption and to formation of certain governance mechanisms that would ensure policy implementation.

This book draws on many years of the editors’ work experience in resource-rich Kazakhstan where the clear majority of people, including practitioners, academics and students, understand energy security as sufficient supply of oil, gas and coal, adequate to meeting the nation’s energy needs and provi...