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How newly developed stress test instruments could shield our energy systems

Extreme weather events and cyber attacks are putting our energy system under increasing pressure. In order to strengthen the system’s resilience, a team of researchers has developed approaches for special stress tests.

In the future, our energy system needs to be better protected against external disruption. It must also be able to quickly return to its normal state after an incident.

A special instrument for stress tests that makes it possible to simulate different scenarios was developed in the ReMoDigital research project. Can a system continue to reliably operate in the event of disruption? Does it at least stay partially operational? Is it capable of quickly restoring itself? These and other questions were studied by project lead Dr Bert Droste-Franke from the Institute for Qualifying Innovation Research and Consulting (IQIB) and his interdisciplinary team of researchers. Among the data studied by the team were findings from the disastrous Ahr Valley flooding of 2021.

© IQIB: Experts having a discussion in the IQIB innovation lab

^{Team of researchers: analysis of regional aspects is paramount} 

A test of test of tools showed “that the analysis of regional aspects, in particular, has major potential for future use”, explains Mr Droste-Franke. Despite a challenging data set and difficulties in creating specific references to real-life impacts of momentary disruption, the research team has produced some promising results: for this purpose, they included various geographical and technical scales into their models for systems-analysis (as these differ in nature and importance between extreme weather events and cyber attacks). The results can be viewed in an interactive and web-based format. The analyses are pooled together in a way that allows users to design resilient energy systems. To support this, they show extreme cases that have been studied as representative examples for individual regions.