Modeling resilience of German offshore energy infrastructures

Abstract

German energy strategy relies heavily on energy produced in offshore wind farms. Initially, the strategy was motivated by environmental factors, but the present crisis in Ukraine has further motivated the strategy by bringing into focus the geopolitical risks related to fossil fuels.

While the strategy counters certain risks, it introduces new challenges. Increasing the percentage of the renewable energy mixture creates an issue with disconnected supply and demand for energy. The plan is to solve this issue with Power-to-X technologies that convert the surplus energy to another form such as hydrogen that can be stored more easily. Subsequently, this plan requires new infrastructures to be build and protected. As energy supply is essential for societal well-being, it is likely that all these facilities will be deemed critical infrastructures, as it is already the case for offshore wind farms. The global trend is to shift from critical infrastructure protection to resilience. In EU, this has led to a new directive on critical entities resilience. Where the resilience means the ability to prevent, resist, mitigate, absorb, accommodate to and recover from an incident. The new directive creates an incentive to model and quantify infrastructure resilience to make effective investments to enhance it.

This presentation introduces our approach to model offshore installation’s resilience. It relies on system modeling to measure the impact of disturbances in combination with operation and maintenance model to assess the speed of recovery. The presentation shows how different scenarios can be represented in the model to test the infrastructure resilience and inform investment decisions.