Qualitative and Systems Approaches to Energy System Risk
The Australian Energy Security team within the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (DISER) is responsible for producing Australia’s National Energy Security Assessment (NESA).
I worked on a project at Paper Giant to run a qualitative research project that collected and synthesised the diverse views and perspectives of energy sector stakeholders to inform the NESA.
Project Team: Reuben Stanton, Daniel Woods, Lottie Greally, Eily Williams
Client: DISER
NESA reports are published every few years, and are used to ensure that government energy policy aligns with the best interests of Australia, and effectively manages energy, infrastructure, investment, mix and market accordingly.
To inform the development of the current NESA, DISER needed to solicit the views of a wide range of energy sector stakeholders in order to understand prioritise the issues that they believe pose a significant risk to Australia’s energy security. Our focus was on risks that were novel, undocumented, or not easy to capture via quantitative research.
We engaged with a total of 51 participants across a set of 6 carefully-designed online workshops: 8 participants from the department, and 43 industry stakeholders. Workshop participants included representatives from across the Australian energy sector: industry groups, regulators, academics, consumer groups, generation, supply, retail, transmission and others.
Our workshops successfully prompted rich and complex discussion, uncovering various views and perceptions of Australia’s energy system and associated risks.
Through a series of facilitated exploratory activities, we uncovered, organised, discussed, and assessed the identified risks to place them within the broader energy security context.
We then synthesised these risks into a consolidated report using two approaches: qualitative affinity mapping to group risks; and systems mapping, to find links and relationships between risks.
Using the workshop data, we were able to present DISER with a new framework for understanding energy security, updated for the 2021 context, that takes into account the diversity of current views, and can be used by to inform the next NESA.