Rethinking Regional Energy Policy: Towards Averting Another Energy Crisis. Do Threats Matter in The Supply and Generation Process?

Abstract

The study investigates potential threats to energy security and sustainable electricity production from a regional perspective, after identifying a host of factors that are likely to affect sustainable energy production and supply using seemingly unrelated regression estimation, which produces efficient estimates by solving two unrelated regression simultaneously. Our results show that the identified threats to energy generation matter. Energy security which we described as the level of diversification in regional specific energy generating sources is probably being affected by regional specific level of industrialization and domestic energy consumption. Issues of over dependence on specific sources of energy supply (particularly nuclear production sources) were also found to have a negative effect on energy security and probably increase the risk of future failure in energy supply.  Energy policy was also found to have a significant effect on energy security. The impacts of various constraints on electricity production were also considered. It was found that many factors affect electricity output production in regions particularly environmental factors that affect consumption and the generation process.

Keywords: Energy Security, Electricity production, Seemingly Unrelated Regression