Indicadores de Seguridad Energética: Aplicación al Sector Energético de Chile

Abstract

Securing energy supply is a complex subject with a great diversity of political, economic and environmental variables. The purpose of methodologies that seek to evaluate the security of energy supply focus on the analysis of energy demand and supply trends, either globally or in the electric power sector. In this paper, indicators for energy security, used globally, are analyzed considering implementation in Chile. The literature describes various indicators, which generally have two options. The first option is to deliver qualitative assessments, where the main idea is the weighting or use of checklists to establish a relation between supply and demand. The second option seeks indicators with quantitative information that allow to measure changes or the evolution of the energy system key variables, such as energy diversity, robustness, firm energy, power and economic aspects. Consistent with the above description, indicators were implemented for diversity, robustness, and over-installation, with public data of the National Energy Commission of the Chilean energy sector, determining their evolution to 2007. Scenarios for the evolution of the energy matrix to 2020 were analyzed, according to energy policies and discussions inside the country, considering the expansion of the system, renewable energy, nuclear and liquefied natural gas, in order to determine the behavior of the indicators mentioned. The indicators allow an evaluation of the various strategies for expansion of the energy matrix of a country, considering a variety of aspects that influence the development of a strategy of secure and robust diversification, implying that its components and expansion decisions are of increasing degree of adaptability to possible changes in the environment. The importance of evaluating the energy security is established, not only in relation to the over installation of power generation capacity, but also to the diversity of energy sources and their dependence on resources from other regions.