CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

BIRUTĖ PRANEVIČIENĖ – VIOLETA VASILIAUSKIENĖ CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ Commission is also developing, together with stakeholders, a comprehensive energy-sector strategy on cybersecurity in smart grid operations to reduce vulnerabilities. 47 Further threats to energy security might be geological, geopolitical, and economic threats, aging infrastructure, terrorist attacks, natural events or intermittency of solar and wind energy, and so on. A complete list cannot be drawn, but it has to be mentioned that the hybrid threats analysed in this article are mostly geopolitical or state caused. One of the threats, considered to be related to possibilities to employ hybrid tactics to reach political or other aims, is the dependency of states on the energy supplying nations. The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in its analysis has developed what does the dependency means in energy sector. The authors stress that in the energy sector, “dependencies influence all components of risk: threat, vulnerability, resilience, and consequence. They can themselves be a threat, affect the resilience and protection of critical infrastructure, and lead to cascading and escalating failures.” 48 In general, Hybrid CoE analysis shows that the development of infrastructure systems and reliance on technologies of information and communication “have increased the potential vulnerabilities to physical and cyber threats and potential consequences resulting from the compromise of underlying systems or networks.” 49 According to the analysis, the potential impacts increase with these dependencies and the ability of the adversaries to exploit them. The origins of the current energy security system may be attributed to a response to 1973 Arab oil embargo to ensure “coordination among the industrialized countries in the event of a disruption in supply, encourage collaboration on energy policies, avoid bruising scrambles for supplies, and deter any future use of an “oil weapon” by exporters.” 50 The main aim of the treaty establishing International Energy Agency was to regulate oil sector security, ensuring strategic stockpiles of oil, “continued monitoring and analysis of energy markets and policies; and energy conservation and coordinated emergency sharing of supplies in the event of a disruption.” 51 Since the system’s inception in the 1970s, a coordinated emergency drawdown of strategic stockpiles has occurred only twice: on the eve of the Gulf War in 1991 and in the autumn of 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. 52 Further developments in the sector are dated from the 1990s. The international community efforts in the sector are combined from the political strategies and declarations and legally binding norms, adopted by the states and international organisations. The mentioned period efforts were directed towards increasing and improving cooperation between Eastern and Western Europe. Russia and its neighbours had a lot of energy resources, but needed investment in their economies, at the same time, Western European countries “were trying to diversify their sources of energy supplies to decrease their potential dependence on other 2. International regal rules on energy security responding to hybrid threats to energy security

47 Ibid. 48 VERNER, op. cit. 37, p. 3. 49 Ibid. 50 Yergin, op. cit. 29, p. 75.

51 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

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