Integrated Energy Infrastructure Planning Tool for Cross-Sector Resilience and Flexibilization Concepts
Abstract
In less than seven years, Austria's electricity supply is intended to be entirely sourced from renewable energy, positioning the country on the home stretch to achieve climate neutrality. To inform this transformation process, numerous interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scenarios by the project consortium attempt to envision how the energy infrastructure, including generation, transportation, conversion, distribution, and utilization, could look in the coming decades. However, preliminary projects highlight serious deficiencies in these planning tools. For instance, the future provision and demand for various energy resources are marked by growing uncertainties that are not currently receiving sufficient attention. Considering the escalating and multifaceted uncertainties, it is imperative to apply radically rethought, cross-sectoral, and integrative resilience and flexibilization concepts. However, not only current political and market framework conditions hinder the application of relevant concepts, but our existing planning tools are also not designed to comprehensively represent their societal value. Flexibility research has been gaining increasing importance in recent years. Energy infrastructure planning tools previously focused on the optimal allocation of resources under average deployment conditions. However, state-of-the-art tools typically have a one-sided focus on the efficient use of surplus resources, such as peak electricity. On the other hand, resilience research primarily deals with disaster risk reduction, safety considerations, the negative impact of sudden resource shortages, and recovery after extreme events. Unlike flexibility research, this research area has a longer history in various disciplines, ranging from food networks, supply chains for material goods, investment portfolios to infrastructure planning. In energy system models, extraordinary deviations still receive insufficient attention. The central opportunity now lies in integrating resilience and flexibilization concepts to plan a resource-efficient and systemically resilient energy infrastructure. Exciting possibilities arise from multi-sectoral coupling. The interface between electricity and bioenergy supply is used as a cross-sectoral use case. This allows for identifying synergies, particularly between measures for dealing with the impacts of climate change, regular fluctuations in solar radiation, wind availability and water supply, wind breakage, snow load, floods, pest infestation and crop damage, as well as societal and trade-related transportation risks.
Publikationen
Project staff
Johannes Schmidt
Assoc. Prof. Priv.-Doz. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.nat.techn. Johannes Schmidt
johannes.schmidt@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-73118
BOKU Project Leader
01.12.2023 - 30.11.2024
Christian Mikovits
Dr. Christian Mikovits MMSc.
christian.mikovits@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-73119
Project Staff
01.12.2023 - 30.11.2024
Sebastian Wehrle
Mag. Sebastian Wehrle
sebastian.wehrle@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-73119
Project Staff
01.12.2023 - 30.11.2024