Now in its 15th edition, the World Energy Council’s World Energy Trilemma Report 2024 places significant emphasis on signals from interviews and workshops with experts in the Council’s worldwide community across more than 100 countries. These experts have utilised the Trilemma Framework to delve into the implications of post-pandemic recovery and the war in Ukraine within specific regions across the world. Special emphasis is placed on managing trade-offs among the dimensions of energy security, equity, and sustainability. These regional reports not only highlight challenges and opportunities but also the examine the effects of recent crises on energy systems and the strategic responses to address them.
The World Energy Trilemma Framework was initially conceived to balance the three pivotal dimensions. Energy security initially focused on safeguarding supply, avoiding shocks from scarcity or geopolitical tensions all the while ensuring the lights stayed on. Energy equity grappled with the key questions of energy access and affordability. Environmental sustainability advocated for practices that would reduce our carbon footprint and preserve the planet for future generations.
The Council has identified that the three dimensions are evolving to reflect new ambitions in managing energy for people and planet and the new threat of poly-crises. Energy security now encompasses the reliability of renewables, availability and accessibility or critical minerals, and resilience in the face of physical and cyber threats. Energy equity has deepened to include new demands for justice, fairer access to and equitable distribution of clean energy benefits, and energy transitions’ impact on vulnerable communities. Environmental sustainability has broadened to a holistic concern for planetary health, embracing circular economy principles, the interconnectedness of water, food, and energy systems, and the better alignment of decarbonisation efforts with the planet’s ecological limits.
The World Energy Council is evolving the World Energy Trilemma framework and its dimensions, extending its use and enabling real-time application through accessible data, new metrics, and expanded practical use of the tool beyond countries to regions and cities as a means of energy transition performance management and pathfinding.
The World Energy Council continues to combine to the use of tools in our World Energy Leadership Toolkit – including the World Energy Trilemma and World Energy Scenarios – to curate better informed and inspiring action-orientated leadership and enable collaborative and transformational pathfinding.
The World Energy Trilemma Index provides insights into a country’s relative energy performance with regards to energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability. In doing so, the Index highlights a country’s challenges in balancing the World Energy Trilemma and opportunities for improvements in meeting energy goals now and in the future. The Index aims to inform policy makers, energy leaders, and the investment and financial sector. Index rankings provide comparisons across countries on each of the three dimensions, whilst historical indexed scores provide insights into the performance trends of each country over time.
The time-lag in national data collection of indicators featured in the 2023 Index means that the comparative rankings may not fully capture the effects of recent transitions in the energy sector or the effects of recent world events such as the war in Ukraine, unrest in the Middle East, and pandemic recovery. Therefore, interviews provide additional context and highlight the challenges caused by the world’s first consumer-led demand-driven energy shock following the invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, underlying long-term data trends offer valuable insights for countries striving for a secure, equitable, and sustainable energy future.
You can read the full report here