Resilience monitoring of future sector-coupled energy systems

Kurzfassung

The transformation of the energy system involves comprehensive decentralization, digitalization and closer coupling of the various demand sectors, e.g. through the use of electricity in vehicles and for heat generation. These massive modifications to the design and operation of the energy system are accompanied by new requirements in terms of security of supply. This also includes resilience to external natural and human-induced shocks. Thus, an incorporation of resilience assessment in models for the design and analysis of future energy systems is important to ensure supply security also in extreme situations. Against the significant changes involved in the transformation, the energy system modeling tools for resilience assessment must also be further developed. The evaluation of the future design and operation of energy systems in high spatial and temporal resolution is possible with energy system optimization models. In this study, the energy system optimization framework REMix is applied to obtain cost-optimal designs of the energy system of Germany in 2050 within the context of various socio-technical scenarios. The scenarios hint at different directions of societal development in terms of technological acceptance, European cooperation, degree of decentralization, realization of digitalization and others. To test the resilience of the different energy system configurations, not only extreme weather effects such as heatwave, storm and a ‘dunkelflaute’, but also cyber-attacks are considered. The effects of such events on energy system infrastructure, resource availability and energy demand are preprocessed and applied to the manifold scenarios using REMix. The responses of the system to the shock events are indicative of its resilience. System performance after such an extreme event is judged by the security of supply in the modelled regions. In addition to performance-based assessment, different system designs derived by the different policy-driven scenarios can be analyzed for their responses to diverse stress events. Diversity in energy generation, transmission network capacity, energy storage capacity and self-sufficiency are a few of the structural indicators used to compare system configurations for resilience. Such an investigation can highlight the framework conditions contributing to higher resilience.