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This book examines the European electric power system as a specific critical infrastructure, which has experienced profound transformations during the last years and is subject to new risks. The nature of the transformations and the character of the risks demand a proper answer due to the central role of electric power in our societies. Traditional approaches, from risk management to emergency preparedness, fall short of providing adequate solutions.

Rapid developments in recent years have led to drastic changes in the way we think about and deal with infrastructures. EU directives called for deregulation of the networked utility infrastructures so that EU common markets could be formed in order to strengthen the EU economy and to achieve a more efficient and high quality service provision. The ensuing liberalisation and internationalisation of the utility sectors affect not only the market structure, but also the physical networks themselves in unprecedented ways.

The electricity infrastructure is one of the most finely meshed infrastructures in existence. In Europe, nearly every home and building is connected to it because electricity is essential to the functioning of modern society. Without electricity, the standard of living would be set back by a century and it would become impossible to perform most economic activities.

This chapter will discuss the Information and Communication Systems (ICS) used in the electric power infrastructure, in light of their relevance for the occurrence and the management of risk-relevant situations.

In this chapter we will develop a view on the risks and the risk decision processes in the European Critical Electricity Infrastructure (ECEI). We will show that, due to their nature and complexity, the management of some of those risks (the ones with an infrastructure resonance) cannot be left alone to the risk managers within each constituting national or regional power system. The risks to the infrastructure impact society as a whole and have to be governed accordingly – i.e. with the participation of all actors or with acknowledgment of all actors' goals and interests.

There is a manifest need to secure the European Critical Electricity Infrastructure. Our analysis of the ECEI system and its dynamic behaviour inevitably led to the conclusion that the reliability and quality of electricity service provision to the European citizen are not adequately secured if all actors are allowed to run their activities at subsystem levels in the “old ways” of the pre-liberalisation era. The established lack of supply security applies to the short term as well as to the long term security of electricity service provision. There are multiple reasons for this conclusion: the emerging European Critical Electricity Infrastructure (ECEI) – including the European electricity market – is a fundamentally different construct from the old situation of interconnected national grids. Even if the latter situation seems comparable with the current ECEI in terms of geographical scale and scope, the complexity of the ECEI is beyond comparison, as it reaches far beyond physical network complexity. With the liberalisation process, many new players have entered the playing field, new roles have been introduced, the rules of the game have changed and are still changing. The complexity of the multi-actor network is unprecedented, and its behaviour is highly unpredictable. On the one side, this unpredictability is a consequence of the multitude of actors involved, our lack of insight in their intentional relationships, their strategic behaviour and learning behaviour. On the other side, the evolution of the multi-actor network and the socio-economic subsystem in which it is embedded are subject to many uncertainties pertaining to market development and evolving regulation, technological innovation and institutional change. Given our lack of experience with liberalised electricity markets in Europe, it is evident that we are not able to identify all the risks that are generated by the dynamic interactions between the physical and socio-economic subsystems that constitute the ECEI.