Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
3.5.2. Energy System Resilience
The resilience of a system relates to the magnitude of disturbance required
to fundamentally disrupt the system causing a dramatic shift to another state of
the system, controlled by a different set of processes. When resilience is lost or
significantly decreased, a system is at high risk of shifting into a qualitatively
different state. The new state of the system may be undesirable. Restoring a
system to it's previous state can be complex, expensive, and sometimes even
impossible. Research suggests that to restore some systems to their previous
state requires a return to conditions well before the point of collapse.
The energy system resilience refers to the capacity of an energy system to
withstand perturbations from e.g. climatic, economic, technological and social
causes and to rebuild and renew itself afterwards [5]. Loss of resilience can
cause loss of valuable energy system services, and may even lead to rapid
transitions or shifts into qualitatively different situations and configurations,
described for e.g. people, ecosystems, knowledge systems, or whole cultures.
In general terms, the vulnerability of a system is assessed according to the
concept of resilience, developed in the mathematics of non-linear differential
equations. According to this frame, the opposite to the vulnerability of a
system is its stability, its resilience, defined specifically as an attribute of a
system. The system is like a net; it consists of a great number of knots, which
are interlinked.
Sometimes change is gradual and things move forward in roughly
continuous and predictable ways. In other times, change is sudden,
disorganized and turbulent reflected by climate impacts, earth system science
challenges and vulnerable regions. Evidence points out to a situation where
periods of such abrupt changes are likely to increase in frequency and
magnitude.[6]
3.5.3. Resilience Metrics
The safety of energy system is the immanent property to any system. It
reflects the quantitative measure of degradation of the system. It may be seen
as the potential property predicting total degradation of the system. It is
commonly known that any degradation of the system proceeds with changes of
the main properties of the system. Since the sustainability index is a complex
property of the system it will lead to the possibility to define those rates of
change, which may have different consequences [9].
