BRICS Energy Supersystem: Protection Against Sanctions and Cyberattacks

Russia, as one of the largest exporters of energy resources, feels this especially acutely, having faced discriminatory Western sanctions. As part of an applied study conducted at the Financial University, specific tools were developed to address this problem within the BRICS framework.

The key idea is to form within the association a cluster of quasi-integrated fuel and energy markets operating on the basis of bilateral and multilateral agreements for trade in oil, gas, coal, and electricity, as well as in services for their storage and transportation. It is proposed to base this on management technologies that proved effective back in Soviet times—the Unified Energy System, the “Mir” Interconnected Power System, and the Druzhba oil pipeline, which for a long time remained the longest in the world. It is precisely this experience in managing highly complex cross-border energy flows that makes Russia the natural technological core of the future BRICS energy supersystem.

An important part of the proposed architecture is a unified digital management environment with elements of artificial intelligence—for predictive maintenance of equipment, power grid optimization, demand forecasting, and generation balancing. However, the study also identified serious risks of excessive automation. Two examples are illustrative: the unsuccessful U.S. attempt to implement an expensive AI-based network-centric management system that ultimately failed to work in emergency situations, and the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, where decision-support systems with automation elements did not cope with an unforeseen course of events. Thus, it is concluded that critically important energy facilities must retain a control loop involving a human expert alongside automated systems.

Special attention is given to the study and assessment of protecting the energy system from so-called network wars—targeted attacks on artificial intelligence systems that manage infrastructure. The concept of controlled fragmentation is proposed: in the event of an attack or a communications failure, the energy supersystem must be able to temporarily break up into autonomous clusters that remain manageable internally, and then independently reintegrate back into a single network. A mathematical model has also been developed describing how the volume of equipment for monitoring digital platforms affects the resilience of the entire system to fluctuations and disruptions: calculations show that expanding monitoring capabilities—not expanding automation itself—is the main factor reducing the risk of cascading outages in power grids.

Also of practical interest is the proposed megaproject—the Global Asian Energy Ring, uniting the energy clusters of major consumers across the Asian space. To ensure the stability of supplies even under possible local conflicts, it is proposed to place, at the nodes of such clusters, nuclear power plants built under the “build-own-operate” model—by analogy with the nuclear power plant in Turkey.

A separate practical tool is the formation of a unified BRICS fuel and energy balance and, in the future, a coordinated currency position of the member countries, including the possibility of settlements using digital instruments. This will reduce the dependence of FER suppliers and consumers on manipulations on exchanges controlled by Western countries and protect the economic sovereignty of the BRICS states.

Finally, the study proposes a concrete technological basis for integration—a unified data-flow management platform for consolidating and analyzing information from all fuel and energy sector facilities of the participating countries, with the deployment of a comprehensive information security suite and the parallel laying of fiber-optic lines along power grids for secure data transmission.

Thus, the applied part of the study provides BRICS not with an abstract strategy, but with a working set of tools—from an organizational model of energy markets and mathematical resilience models to specific infrastructure projects that can already be adapted today to the conditions of sanctions pressure and hybrid threats.

Author: Associate Professor, Department of World Economy and World Finance, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation Ruslan Vladislavovich Ozarnov.