Policy and Technical Methods for Energy Security and Critical Infrastructure Protection Across Northern Europe, Ukraine, and the Taiwan Strait
The current decade has seen tensions emerge across a variety of global flashpoints, increasingly featuring the weaponization of energy resources and infrastructure investments by authoritarian nations against democracies. These threats have resulted in energy intermittency, political instability, and, in extreme cases, energy poverty.
The past two years have seen this trend reach a logical apex, as energy supplies and associated critical infrastructure in both the Northern European region, as well as in East Asia, have not only faced growing political threats from the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, respectively, but cyber and physical sabotage attacks against distributed infrastructure facilities, cables, pipelines, and renewable
energy installations.
This project will build upon previous research supported by the Kleinman Center, to continue the study and development of next-generation policy and technical responses for democracies to deploy against these threats, and to build out an open-source intelligence toolkit to help democracies identify, attribute, and ultimately, deter these emerging physical threats against critical infrastructure in both maritime and remote environments
Benjamin Schmitt
Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center and SASBenjamin Schmitt is a joint senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Penn. He is also an affiliate of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute.
