Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Energy security

The ability of a country to access sufficient, reliable and affordable energy to meet its needs without dangerous dependence on potentially unreliable foreign suppliers. A country that imports 55% of its gas from a single country that may restrict supplies (as Germany did with Russia) is energy insecure even if supplies are currently flowing.

Energy mix

The combination of different energy sources — fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables — that a country uses to meet its total energy demand. The mix reflects geology, geography, history, politics and economics. No single source can supply all energy needs, which is why diversification across multiple sources reduces vulnerability.

Fossil fuels

Non-renewable energy sources — coal, oil, and natural gas — formed from the compressed remains of ancient organisms over millions of years. They currently supply approximately 80% of global primary energy. Burning them releases CO₂, the main driver of human-caused climate change, and their reserves are finite — once used, they cannot be replaced on human timescales.

Renewable energy

Energy from sources that are naturally replenished — including wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal, wave, and geothermal. They produce little or no greenhouse gas during generation and will never run out. But some (wind, solar) are intermittent — they do not generate continuously — which creates challenges for grid stability.

Intermittency

The characteristic of some renewable energy sources (wind, solar) that their output varies with weather conditions rather than being constant and controllable. A national grid requires supply and demand to match at every moment. Intermittent sources require either backup generation (usually gas) or storage (batteries, pumped hydro) to ensure supply when generation falls.

Resource curse

The paradox in which countries with large natural resource wealth (oil, gas, minerals) often experience worse development outcomes — lower growth, higher inequality, poorer governance — than countries without such resources. Nigeria is an example: despite 80% of export revenues from oil, 40% of its population lacks electricity. Mechanisms include Dutch disease (currency appreciation destroys other industries) and corruption (resource revenues create incentives for theft rather than investment).

Dutch disease

The economic effect whereby large revenues from a natural resource export (oil, gas) cause a country's currency to rise in value, making all other exports — manufactured goods, agriculture — too expensive for foreign buyers, destroying those industries. Named after the Netherlands, where North Sea gas revenues in the 1960s damaged Dutch manufacturing. Nigeria's oil wealth has caused Dutch disease effects on its agricultural and manufacturing sectors.

Energiewende

Germany's national energy transition policy, launched in 2000. It aimed to shift electricity generation from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables through feed-in tariffs that guaranteed income for renewable generators. It grew renewable electricity from 6% in 2000 to ~50% by 2023, but left Germany heavily dependent on Russian gas for heating and industry — a vulnerability exposed by the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

Feed-in tariff (FIT)

A government policy that pays a guaranteed above-market price to anyone who generates electricity from renewables and supplies it to the grid. FITs reduce the financial risk of investing in wind and solar, accelerating uptake. Germany's FIT system drove the Energiewende's renewable expansion. The UK used a similar system in the 2010s.