Energy Security and Resilience: Reviewing Concepts and Advancing Planning Perspectives for Transforming Integrated Energy Systems

2025-04-25

AI Summary

Energy systems face escalating compound disruptions—including pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, supply chain breakdowns, and climate change—necessitating enhanced security and resilience to support the energy transition. Method: This study clarifies the conceptual foundations and interrelationships between energy security and resilience, and introduces a novel “shock event–slow-burn process” dual disturbance classification framework. It develops a multi-dimensional (technical–economic–environmental) and multi-temporal (short–medium–long-term) resilience assessment and planning methodology. Contribution/Results: The work proposes an innovative, full-capability-layer resilience strategy spectrum—enabling a paradigm shift from reactive response to proactive, system-level design. It delivers an actionable resilience enhancement roadmap and a comprehensive policy package, providing both theoretical grounding and practical tools for robust planning and dynamic adaptation of integrated energy systems under compound risks.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

Recent events, including the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, supply chain disruptions, and climate change impacts, have exposed the critical need to ensure energy security and resilience in energy systems. We review existing definitions and interrelations between energy security and resilience, conceptualising these terms in the context of energy system transformations. We introduce a classification of disturbances into shock events and slow burn processes to highlight key challenges to energy system resilience. Examples illustrate their distinct impacts on technical, economic, and environmental system performance over time. We compile relevant recourse options across resilience capacity levels and system planning horizons to address these challenges, emphasising actionable strategies for an increasingly integrated energy system. Finally, we propose policy recommendations to integrate shock events and slow burn processes into future energy system planning, enabling forward-looking decision-making and system design to analyse and mitigate potential disruptions.

Problem

• Defining energy security and resilience in transforming systems
• Classifying disturbances as shocks or slow burn processes
• Proposing policy for resilient integrated energy planning

Innovation

• Classifying disturbances into shocks and slow burns
• Compiling recourse options across resilience levels
• Proposing policy for integrated energy planning