Energy Strategy Reviews (Mar 2025)
Robustness and resilience of energy systems to extreme events: A review of assessment methods and strategies
Abstract
This comprehensive review investigates the robustness and resilience of energy systems in response to extreme events, emphasizing the need for enhanced methodologies and strategies to mitigate the growing vulnerabilities in modern power grids. The study clarifies conceptual definitions and relationships between key resilience metrics, reliability, robustness, and flexibility while analyzing their applications across multi-energy systems. The review identifies critical gaps in resilience assessment, including a lack of unified definitions, insufficient documentation of financial and social costs, and challenges in integrating resilience into infrastructure planning. This work provides a framework for advancing energy system robustness and offers recommendations for future research to ensure sustainable and reliable energy delivery amidst increasing uncertainties. Despite the extensive development of resilience robustness measurements since the 1950s, only a limited number of centrality metrics, including degree, betweenness, and clustering coefficient, have been widely used. This study presents an overview of robustness resilience metrics and examines their usefulness in networks. The computational complexity of the resilience indicators examined in this study is also explored. The comprehensive examination of the evaluated robustness metrics promotes their use in addressing diverse network computing and engineering challenges. It emphasizes the need for collaborative efforts and the necessity for equitable solutions across the phases of energy planning, design, and operation to enhance energy resilience.