Politics of Energy Security

A century ago, Sir Winston Churchill recognised that ‘Safety and certainty in oil lies in variety and variety alone.’ Energy diplomacy goals should crucially go beyond engaging energy partners and must include India’s entire neighbourhood, both immediate and extended. There are several economic challenges to India’s energy security - demand and supply issues, gas pricing issues, high costs of installing power plants, inefficient allocation of resources, need for reform, and challenge of deregulation and (over) dependence on imports are just some of these.

• As the coal sector opens up to private investment and many claim it brings more efficiency and competitiveness, the challenges of a private-public partnership model and how that would work also need to be addressed.
• Then there are technical challenges - India’s power grid suffers from uneven and spotty power (as little as 3-4 hours a day), frequency fluctuations, load generation imbalances, shortage of equipments such as generators, boilers and turbines.
• India’s aging and overburdened power infrastructure is a technical nightmare, and this was demonstrated by the 2012 power grid collapse that left 600 million people without electricity for two days.
• It raised important questions about supply, load imbalances, inefficiency, administration, grid compliance, and responsibility and so on.

Politics of Energy Security

It is clear that India’s energy crisis is multidimensional, but these seemingly different aspects are also intricately interconnected. Inherent to these challenges is an overarching political aspect to the crisis and this is not specific to India.

• Energy is and has always been a deeply political issue. This was understood profoundly by the international community in 1973, during the Arab-Israel War, when several Arab countries imposed an oil embargo against the US, to protest its support for Israel.
• Energy goals and security goals are often intertwined. This is essentially because of the interconnectedness of international relations. As regions shrink in geostrategic terms, threats from the choke points have far-reaching impact. From a security/strategic perspective, a crisis or the threat of crisis is always around the corner.
• The motivation for energy diplomacy comes from this principle. As India deals with an acute energy crisis in an unenviable neighbourhood, its energy goals are quite visibly defined within the larger framework of its foreign and security goals.