Department of Industry, Science and Resources
Mapping the emerging risks to Australia's energy security
Australia's energy landscape is shifting fast — and the risks are shifting with it. We partnered with the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) to bring together 51 senior energy sector stakeholders across six national workshops, surfacing the novel and undocumented risks that traditional assessments miss. The result was a new framework for understanding energy security that's grounded in real-world expertise and ready for what's ahead.
Outcomes
- A new framework for understanding Australia's energy security risk, situating risks in emerging strategic and geopolitical context
- 35 emerging risks to Australia's energy security documented, along with their potential mitigations
- Shared alignment across 51 senior energy sector stakeholders from across Australia, developed through six online workshops
Services
A critical moment for energy security
DISR's Australian Energy Security team produces the National Energy Security Assessments (NESA) — reports that shape government energy policy by providing risk context for infrastructure, investment, and market factors. With the next NESA on the horizon, the team needed a richer picture of the risks facing Australia's energy system. They wanted to hear directly from the people closest to these challenges — and to surface the risks that weren't getting enough attention.
We identified and mapped risks to the energy sector across four horizons: Now, Short term, Medium term and Long term.
Bringing diverse voices into the conversation
We brought together 51 participants across six online workshops — from departmental senior executives and industry leaders to energy regulators, academics, generation and transmission experts, consumer advocates, and retailers. Participants spanned urban and rural perspectives, giving us a wide lens on the challenges ahead. The conversations moved from specific technical and policy issues to broader questions about Australia's future, climate change, and geopolitics. Our focus was on risks that were novel, undocumented, or difficult to capture through quantitative research alone.
We ran hybrid workshops with complex groups of stakeholders, mapping specific technical and policy issues.
Building a new framework for energy security
Participants brought varied and nuanced perspectives on the current system and the road ahead. We asked them to respond to a range of existing definitions for energy security — and together, they developed a new framework that reflects and balances the views of the group. This framework expands on the definition last updated in the 2011 NESA, bringing it in line with today's rapidly changing energy landscape.
We produced a new framework for understanding energy security, covering What the Energy Systen is, Who is it for, and How it works.
Going deeper on risk
We designed workshops that gave participants space to share detailed, unfiltered perspectives — moving well beyond surface-level risks. Carefully crafted prompts, including energy futures scenarios and causal mapping, helped participants produce new insights on areas with high potential impact. We created a safe environment for a diverse group to express their views fully and find alignment. The energy futures we explored together — including a likely transition to net zero and increasing electrification — established a tangible strategic landscape for testing emergent risk.
Revealing hidden connections
Our analysis uncovered novel relationships between risks by building a future-focused framework that considers causal factors and the links between seemingly standalone threats. We identified risks with flow-on effects that increase the likelihood of potentially critical energy security impacts. By bringing together organisationally disparate groups in a single, future-focused process — and supporting them to apply their sector experience to deep, novel risk mapping — we created shared understanding and new insight on one of the biggest issues facing Australia.
We worked to show how identified risks were connected and related to each other, so that stakeholders could easily identify priority points in the energy system for new policies, strategies and mitigations.
