Exploring the Dimensions of Energy Security in Relation to the National Power Grid

With the increasing occurrence of energy collapses worldwide, often manifested as electricity shortages (commonly referred to as blackouts) impacting industrial and household consumers, this paper addresses a highly significant and relevant issue. Critical power infrastructures are inherently vulnerable to various internal and external factors. The National Power Grid (NPG), as a crucial component of the National Power System (NPS), encompasses infrastructures of national importance. The inability of the NPG to operate fully or partially (resulting in blackouts or brownouts) leads to energy insecurity, posing severe and potentially catastrophic consequences for industrial operations, the economy, society, and national security. Due to the fact that NPG is of national strategic importance, it has to be assessed and monitored permanently in terms of security risks, in order to identify vulnerabilities, and this need for assessment also comes from the European perspective because Romania is interconnected to ENTSO-E (European Network of Transmission System Operators) which interconnects various power lines from North to South, from West to East, or even with Africa and Asia. By knowing the vulnerabilities, one can automatically identify the hazards and threats to which it is subjected and engaged, being able to develop national / European measures or strategies for the protection and security of the critical infrastructures related to NPS. For this reason, it is considered that the identification of vulnerabilities must become a pressing issue of societal, national and implicitly European security. In conclusion, based on the risk assessment of energy security on critical infrastructure (substations and overhead lines) within NPG, 26 vulnerabilities have been identified. For instance, 13 internal vulnerabilities with internal impact within the NPG, 4 internal vulnerabilities with external impact on the European EEA and 9 external vulnerabilities within the EEA internal impact on the international NPG.