Measuring resilience in energy systems: insights from a range of disciplines

By L. Molyneaux, Colin Brown, Wagner Liam, John Foster. 2016

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economic stability is dependent on the effective functioning and resilience of energy systems. Resilience is a term used across all research disciplines and in everyday discourse. As a concept it purports to serve as a useful indicator of sustainability and robustness, but it has proved difficult to measure. Ecological resilience, psychological resilience, risk management and energy security are all fields of research in which measures of the ability to respond to the unexpected are sought. The goal is to build adaptive capacity but quite different methods have been developed to achieve this end. Research on energy security, in particular, has focused on the security of oil supplies, not resilience or the adaptive capacity of the energy system or the role that renewable energy plays in building such capacity. This paper discusses how different disciplines seek to measure and build resilience and explores its connection with the state or quality of a system’s adaptive capacity. When the parameters of redundancy and diversity are present, resilience is enhanced. For this reason, in energy systems we must understand the size and scope of the key parameters required to facilitate the development of adaptive capacity and to build resilience that can enhance economic stability.

Subfields: General Energy, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24993b3c71577d6f7d4ca5a53d098baa533e8709

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Energy

1. Peter D. Lund
2. Christian Breyer

In Pollution

1. Michael Child
2. Peter D. Lund
3. Christian Breyer
4. D. Bogdanov

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. Michael Child
2. Peter D. Lund
3. Christian Breyer
4. Diogenis Baboukardos

Citations in the corpus

• Sustainability guardrails for energy scenarios of the global energy transition (2018, background): “[79] reaffirm the idea that a broader size and scope of energy systems must be understood in order to ensure the resilience that enhances overall economic stability.”
• Energy system resilience – A review (2021, background): “provide a more integrated view on energy security and energy resilience by discussing and defining related terminology [35,36], concepts [1,37, 38], and different perspectives on the issues [39,40].”