Energy Security in ASEAN: A Quantitative Approach for Sustainable Energy Policy

We investigate energy security of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) under the 4-A’s framework. The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) agreement launched in 2015 renewed a regional focus on energy security and sustainability. We employ an analytic framework to quantitatively assess progress in different categories including availability, acceptability, affordability, and applicability. Key metrics include the documentation of CO2 emissions, energy access measures, and energy supply reserves from 2005–2010. We identify relevant energy indicators using high quality historical data from the IEA and World Bank. We find that ASEAN made little progress toward establishing energy security in the previous five-year planning period (2005–2010) as it regressed in most categories except applicability. Therefore, we suggest that increased development of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies would move ASEAN in a positive direction toward achieving energy security and sustainable energy policy goals.