Marsh & McLennan and Oliver Wyman are proud to present the World Energy Trilemma Index 2020 in partnership with the World Energy Council.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the World Energy Trilemma Index presents a comparative ranking of 128 countries’ energy systems. It provides an objective rating of national energy policy and performance across three dimensions: Energy Security, Energy Equity and the Environmental Sustainability of Energy Systems. The Index studies historic trends, enabling energy policy makers and stakeholders to keep track of their policy performance over time, and facilitating comparisons with others.
In this year’s Trilemma, the overall scores top ten ranks remain dominated by OECD countries, which illustrates the benefit of longstanding active energy policies. The top three ranking countries of Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark have overall scores of 84 and above. The top ten ranks have a strong European flavor with Canada, the United States and New Zealand breaking the OECD European monopoly. This year we have introduced tied ranks due to the closeness of some country scores; for example, Austria and Finland have the same score and are ranked 4th while the UK and France also share the same score to be ranked 5th. The closeness of the scores also prompted the use of the broader ranking definition so that the top ten ranks include more than ten countries due to tied ranks with equal scores.
In the Energy Security dimension, the top ten ranks include countries with significant hydrocarbon resources alongside countries focused on diversifying and decarbonizing. Significant natural resource endowment strongly underpins good performance, although hydrocarbon resources abundance can also be a “resource” curse: the performance of some hydrocarbon-rich countries is declining as they concentrate their energy systems rather than diversifying them. Diversifying a country’s energy mix improves energy security scores and leads to a stronger emphasis on system resilience.
The Energy Equity top ten ranks benefit from producer countries with low energy costs for consumers – implicit subsidies – that may be more challenging moving forward in a more volatile price environment post-COVID-19. The top performers are small, wealthy nations with high GDP, strong interconnections, low energy prices through subsidy and/or significant easily extractable energy resources.
In the Environmental Sustainability dimension, the top ten rank showcases strong policy efforts to decarbonize and diversified energy systems, supported by strong policy instruments to reduce GHG emissions significantly, coupled with energy efficiency measures, deliver a strong performance in the environmental sustainability dimension. Driving down energy intensity can assist countries yet to decarbonize their energy mix. Ensuring an inclusive decarbonization that leaves no communities behind will be essential to humanize energy.
The top country ranks and full results are available through the Trilemma interactive online tool since the year 2000. Please see below to access the complete results, national Trilemma profiles and what it takes to build a sustainable energy system.
