Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
2.
E
NERGY
S
YSTEM
R
ESILIENCE
2.1.
I
NTRODUCTION
The energy resilience is the ability of an energy system to provide and
maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various challenges to
normal operation.
Resilience can be defined in two ways. The first is a measure of the
magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its
structure by changing the variables and processes that control behavior. The
second, a more traditional meaning, is as a measure of resistance to the
disturbance and the speed of return to the equilibrium state of an ecosystem.
Resilience networks aim to provide the acceptable service to applications:
ability for users and applications to access information when needed, e.g.
distributed database access, sensor monitoring, situational awareness and
operation of distributed processing and networked storage, e.g.: ability for
distributed processes to communicate with one another, ability for processes to
read and write networked storage. Note that the resilience is a superset of
survivability [1].
The sustainability paradigm is a complex idea, which is defined and
interpreted as the intergenerational phenomena, as the level of scale, multiple
domains, social development of societies and multiple interpretations of
sustainable development. In the understanding of sustainability development
the major precondition is to highlight the role of the material and energy
consumption as a source of unsustainable pattern of the development. The
need to balance the economic, environmental, technological and social
