From Climate Risks to Climate-Resilient Energy Systems: Smart Renewable Energy Planning and Energy Security in Southeast Asian Island Cities

Small power systems subject to hazards in the island cities of Southeast Asia increase the vulnerability of energy security, and require good climate-risk management, data integration and adaptive energy planning. This study proposes and validates a model that connects climate-risk salience to island energy security through renewable-energy planning capability, and investigates the institutional coordination as a moderating variable. We examined four constructs with 22 seven-point items with a cross-sectional survey online with 428 respondents from a range of utility, regulatory, municipal, developer, finance, research and community stakeholders across seven island contexts in the region. Ordinary least squares estimation with 5000 bootstrap resamples, mediation, moderation and ten-fold predictive assessment were used to estimate a component-based structural model. Energy security is negatively predicted by climate-risk salience (β = −0.142) while planning capability is positively predicted (β = 0.487). Island energy security is strongly associated with planning capability (β = 0.557) which mediates the relationship between climate-risk salience and energy security (β = 0.271). Greater institutional coordination strengthens the association between planning capability and energy security (β = 0.172). The model accounts for 54.5% of security variance, indicating that risk awareness is effective when applied in coordinated adaptive planning.