The world is moving from a unipolar model toward a more complex, multipolar system. And in the emerging world order, energy fairness — the decent and sustainable access of nations and peoples to energy for daily life, economic growth, and long-term development — is becoming one of the key questions of international relations.
Two processes give it particular urgency. The first is the energy crisis, intensified by restrictions, blockades, and the confrontational actions of certain global and regional players. Already today it is constraining access to resources and driving up the cost of energy for the economy.
The second is the energy transition — that is, a change in the technological base of the energy sector. It makes access critically important not only to raw materials but also to new advanced technologies, knowledge, and engineering competencies required to meet rising energy consumption as soon as tomorrow.
In the report presented here, energy fairness is understood as a system of relations in which the distribution of resources, technologies, and knowledge enables every state to achieve energy viability: the ability of countries, drawing on physically and economically accessible energy, to meet the current needs of their economy and to independently design and secure long-term development scenarios.
Achieving energy viability becomes possible through the formation of a new technological foundation. It is bound up with the diversification of energy sources; the deep electrification of industry, transport, and the urban environment; the integration of energy with digital platforms into hybrid adaptive systems (the so-called "Internet of Energy") and intelligent distributed power systems; and the development of hydrogen power and small-scale nuclear power.
In practical terms, fairness secures access to three critical components: resources (including raw-material and financial resources), the technologies of the new energy paradigm, and the competencies to develop a country’s own energy policy and its technological underpinning.
Technological sovereignty therefore becomes the foundation of energy fairness. Command of technologies and competencies becomes an even more important factor of success than the mere possession of hydrocarbon reserves and other resources.
The role of human capital is equally vital here, as is the building of national engineering schools as the foundation of technological sovereignty and energy fairness. Access to advanced technologies is in itself merely a tool — one that is useless without qualified personnel and a country’s own research and engineering centers.
We are publishing this report as a contribution to the discussion of the world’s future energy architecture and as an open step toward the stated goal — so that countries, organizations, and expert communities can draw on a shared factual basis to develop practical strategies for energy development. The document was prepared in cooperation between the Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, the National Technology Initiative Platform, and the EnergyNet Center.