Quantitative Assessment of Iran's Energy Security and Sensitivity Analysis of the Results with respect to the Computation method

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Faculty of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

2 Faculty of Mechanical and Energy engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.

10.22034/jrenew.2026.248029
Abstract
This study presents a localized and updated definition of energy security and evaluates Iran's overall energy security index during the period 2005 to 2021 using 22 indicators categorized into five main groups namely continuity of sustainable supply, safety and reliability of supply, environmental and natural resource constraints, economic constraints and resilience, and political security constraints. Considering the role of renewable energy technologies in sustainable development, this study evaluates the impact of critical raw minerals required for production of renewable energy technologies on energy security. The results indicate that the composite energy security index has followed a downward trend during the mentioned period. The highest and lowest energy security indices during the studied period were 0.56 in 2007 and 0.38 in 2018, respectively. The Herfindahl Hirschman Index is used to assess critical raw mineral scarcity for renewable technologies, revealing high production concentration in a few countries, which poses energy security challenges. This paper analyzes the sensitivity of the energy security index to normalization, aggregation, and classification methods to explain discrepancies in its calculation across studies. Results show high sensitivity to normalization methods.

Keywords

Subjects

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  • Receive Date 11 April 2025
  • Revise Date 20 July 2025
  • Accept Date 19 September 2025