Net modelling of energy mix among European Countries: A proposal for ruling new scenarios

European energy policy pursues the objective of a sustainable, competitive and secure supply of energy. In 2007, the European Commission adopted an energy policy for Europe, which was supported by several documents on different aspects of energy and included an action plan to meet the major energy challenges Europe has to face. A farsighted diversified yearly mix of energies was suggested to countries, aiming at increasing security of supply and efficiency, but a wide and contemporary view of energy interchanges between states was not available. In a previous work of the same authors, energy import/export interchanges between European States were used to develop a geographic overview at one-glance. In this paper, the enhanced Interchange Energy Network (IEN) is investigated from a modelling point of view, as a Small-World Net, by supposing that connections can exist between States with a probability depending also on economic/political relations between countries.

► Different view of the imports and exports of electric energy flows between European for potential use in ruling exchanges.
► Panel data from 1996 to 2008 as part of a network of exchanges was considered from Eurostat official database.
► The European import/export energy flows modelled as a network with Small-World phenomena, interpreting the evolution over the years.
► Interesting behavioural features as outcome derived, as shown for the case example of the Germany.