Investigating the Influence of System Structure and Architecture in the Risks of Sector-coupled Energy Systems with FMEA

Abstract

For a successful energy transition, the renewable energy supply in the sectors of electricity, mobility and heat should be equally addressed. This paper presents a suitable method for performing a comprehensive hazard and risk analysis of such a multi-modal local energy system. The method allows identifying trends in the level of critical risks of different failure modes and the influence of the system structure in their behavior. Decentralization limits the impact of failures in different technologies by giving each of those technologies a lower contribution. However, this strategy introduces new failure modes to the energy system, which are related to the decentralized units. Additionally, the proposed method minimizes the required input from expert judgements regarding the values for occurrence and detect-ability and limits it to the component level where solid expert knowledge can be found.