The World Economic Forum is getting ready for its high-profile conference in Davos, Switzerland this month and has kicked off preparations with a controversial but eye-catching ranking of global “energy architecture” on a country-by-country level.

After several years of focusing on the outcome of the financial crisis, the world leaders and business titans famous for gathering at Davos may now finally turn their focus to the energy sector, which continues to go through significant convulsions created by shifting fuel markets, renewable energy integration and complex policy debates.

Echoing the criteria in the World Energy Council’s own ranking of governments on its energy trilemma policy approach, the WEF measures “the strengths and weaknesses of countries’ energy systems from an integrated economic environmental and energy security perspective,” WEF and the consultancy Accenture – which partnered on the report – said.

Read more about the most WEC report on Breaking Energy here.

Some of the results are less than surprising – the richer a country is, generally speaking – the more likely it is to be managing a transition to a new, more sustainable, energy architecture through strong policy coupled with multiple energy resources. Norway, which so often leads lists of this kind, is at number one in the Global Energy Architecture Performance Index 2013.

There are some interesting surprises in the rankings. Colombia, a country with substantial natural resources but a wide array of challenges to forming an integrated national energy architecture, comes in at number six on the WEF index. The US ranks 55th, while China – the world’s second largest economy – ranks at number 74.

While the report calls for a common understanding of trade-offs that can lead to clear objectives, the organization and the consulting giant expect solutions to remain national rather than global in nature.

“The scale and complexity of the global energy industry demands a country-by-country approach to managing change,” Energy Industry Managing Director at Accenture Arthur Hanna said in releasing the report in December.

Download the report itself here.