Energy security cultures in the European Union
Energy security cultures in the European Union

Summary/Abstract: The research problem under analysis in this text is ‘energy security cultures’ in the European Union. The main goal of the research is to conduct a comparative analysis involving selected existing research papers on ‘energy cultures.’ In the analysis, attention is drawn to research employing quantitative methods based on object clustering methods.Given the necessity to make the research problem more specific, the text addresses the following research questions: (1) Is the claim that the European Union presents special ‘energy security cultures’ legitimate?, (2) Did the period of2008-2012 witness changes to the above-established ‘energy security cultures’ in the European Union?In order to conduct the analysis concerned with the existence or non-existence of ‘energy security cultures’ in the European Union, the following indices have been adopted: (1) the index of the energy intensity of the economy, (2) the index of energy dependence, (3) the Stirling index, (4) the index of network losses and (5) the index of renewable energy use. It is considered that the selected indices constitute a definiens of the adopted term of an ‘energy security culture.’To verify the assumptions made in the analysis, use was made of one agglomerative method (i.e. Ward’s method) and one method for optimising a given cluster of objects (the k-means method).

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