Resilience of our energy system: from climate change to war

Recent years have witnessed tremendous natural and man-made disasters in Australia and around the world. These include events linked to climate change ranging from bushfires (e.g., Australia and California) to – very recently and unfortunately again in Australia – severe flooding. The last few years have also seen other dramatic forms of extreme, high impact, low probability events, such as the global Covid-19 pandemic and, most recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These extreme events have sent shock waves to local and global energy infrastructures, markets, and supply chains, and call for a general rethinking of the concept of reliability and security of supply to make energy systems more “resilient”.

It is in this context that CIGRE established in 2018, Working Group (WG) C4.47 “Power system resilience”, with the aim of providing guidance to help standardise different approaches that can enhance power system resilience thinking across parties such as consumers, various market stakeholders, utilities, regulators and governments. The WG has now produced a report, WGR_320_1, on “Resilience of interdependent critical infrastructure”.  The Australian member on the WG is Pierluigi Mancarella who has produced this article.

One of the initial key tasks of the working group was to provide a new, more consolidated definition of resilience as “the ability to limit the extent, severity, and duration of system degradation following an extreme event”. Interestingly, this definition can also be applied beyond physical events and infrastructures, and can be used to describe and model, for example, how resilient the international energy market, seen as a techno-economic global system, is to the stress that a war such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is bringing. Indeed, another major task of the WG was to study the impact of extreme events on integrated infrastructures (e.g., electricity, gas, water, etc.), as well as the potential ability of an integrated infrastructure to provide whole-system resilience. The propagation of a war event onto multiple energy commodity markets worldwide, with skyrocketing prices for gas and then electricity well beyond Europe, clearly demonstrates the relevance and timeliness of such activity. Another example is the dramatic winter crisis in Texas of February 2021, when both the gas and electricity systems largely shut down, unfortunately leading to several casualties. The global pandemic is another such case.

The latest and ongoing activities of the WG aim to address the translation of the resilience features that have been identified more theoretically into real-world applications. For example, how they may be implemented from a regulatory perspective, and then inform new market designs and policy and more generally, government interventions. The WG Report discusses the types and frameworks of interdependencies between diverse but interacting infrastructure systems and proposes potential metrics and high-level assessment methodologies.

There are lots of WG results that are extremely relevant to Australia, particularly in terms of how more distributed energy infrastructures such as microgrids and “smarter grids”, could boost power system resilience.  For example a smarter grid relying on flexible network and demand-side operation facilitated by system digitalization, might be preferred in many cases to investment in asset redundancy and system robustness, which have been more classical solutions in the past.  In addition, recent work from the Australian Energy Market Commission is designed to enhance power system resilience through their new concepts of “indistinct events” and rule changes to allow the Australian Energy Market Operator to manage the risk of these events.

Hopefully such new “resilience-driven thinking” will support and speed up Australia’s journey towards a low-carbon and then net-zero energy system that is also affordable, reliable and, indeed, resilient.

The WG Report is available via e-cigre free for members and 30€ for non-members.