Three blind men and elephant: The case of energy indices to measure energy security and sustainability

Abstract

An 'Energy Index', which is aggregated from energy indicators is a rich source of information and is helpful in providing an assessment of a country's performance. This has, however, resulted in mushrooming of a plethora of indices, which claim to quantify the performance of a country in attaining the goal of energy security and energy sustainability.The paper attempts to compare three different indices, viz., 'Energy Sustainability Index', 'International Index of Energy Security Risk', 'Energy Architecture Performance Index' and their variants to establish whether they provide consistent rankings for various countries. A comparative assessment reveals that different indices provide different country rankings, which are inconsistent, especially for countries which perform poorly. Further, the impact of minor methodological change in the composition of the index is different on different countries. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that countries which consistently rank in the top of the list of different indices have robust energy systems as they are insensitive to differences in construction of the index. However, the scores of countries which show poor performance vary widely and therefore their ranking is unreliable. This situation is akin to blind men groping the elephant with each one measuring a different part of the body (considering its huge size) and asserting their assessment of the animal's size only to be true. Therefore, while one's subjective experience may be true it may not be the totality of the truth. Similarly, although the ranking from each of the variants of the indices may be correct, they only present a part of the picture and not the whole picture of a country's energy security and sustainability. Hence, while various energy indices give relevant information, much more needs to be done, to examine energy security and sustainability with other relevant tools.