From Coupling to Resilience: Quantifying the Impact of Interconnection in Energy Carrier Grids

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the interconnection of energy carrier grids affects their resilience, using simulations to analyze the influence of network topology and coupling density on system stability during high-impact events.

Contribution

It introduces a Monte Carlo simulation approach to quantify the impact of grid interconnections on resilience, linking topological metrics to system robustness in multi-energy systems.

Findings

Impact metric effectively measures inter-grid influence.

Higher coupling densities can reduce resilience in single-carrier grids.

Centrality metrics influence the impact of grid components on resilience.

Abstract

Due to the increasing share of renewable energy resources and the emergence of couplings of different energy carrier grids, which may support the electricity networks by providing additional flexibility, conducting research on the properties of multi-energy systems is necessary. Primarily to keep stable grid operation and provide efficient planning, the resilience of such systems against low-probability, high-impact events is central. Previous steady-state resilience studies of electricity grids also involved investigating the topological attributes from a complex network theory perspective. However, this work aims to determine the influence of complex topological attributes on the resilience of coupled energy grids. To achieve this, we set up a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the load-shedding performance indicator for the grids when affected by high-impact events. This indicator is used to calculate resilience metrics, which express the influence of the grids on each other. The metrics are the base to search for correlations between centrality/vitality metrics and the resilience impact metric. We apply our method to a case study based on a benchmark electricity grid. Our results show that, first, our impact metric is feasible for determining the influences of the network on each other. Second, we show that increasing coupling densities can lead to lower resilience in single-carrier grids. Third, it is apparent that centrality influences the impact of the grid components' resilience.