Dear students,
I would like to welcome you to an interview as part of the learning unit, Vulnerability and Resilience of Energy Systems.
You have certainly already looked at the first two episodes of the lecture together with Prof. Dr. Gößling-Reisemann.
We want to expand on these somewhat.
-So Mr Gößling-Reisemann, as consumers, must we now start thinking seriously about the vulnerability and resilience of our energy systems rather than just drawing electricity from the outlet? -This is something that touches on another issue I have also raised.
What role does the demand on the energy system actually play? Yes, we should think about it, because this during transition to the age of renewable energies,
so during this transition period, it may be the case that energy supply will not always be as secure as it was when we relied on fossil fuels.
At least, we have to keep this in mind, and, as I have shown,
some new dangers have arisen that we were not aware of before, coming as a result of the consolidation of energy systems and so on.
However, this does not mean that the customer simply has to accept this. Rather, for one thing, the various consumers – industry, private, and so on – can consider how they want to deal with such uncertainties in the future.
We live here in Germany in a situation that is almost like paradise.
We have always had an extremely good and stable power supply.
And outage time is extremely low, which, of course, benefits industry and business.
In other countries, including developed countries such as the USA,
for example, this is quite different.
You can prepare for it, but you first have to be aware that something like the security of supply is not a naturally supplied commodity.
Rather, it is something that involves not only investment but also a willingness to adapt. - You have also shown that different components of the energy system are converging:
electricity and information, communication technologies, electricity and gas, electricity and heat, electricity and transport with regard to, for example, e-mobility.
How do you assess the current state of this convergence?
Is there actually great potential, as we're saying, in these smart grids for example? Will we draw upon these in the future?
We have to lower our expectations.
Not as much as we might have imagined, but we are also not much further than we might have planned. When it comes to e-mobility, we certainly counted on more.
The diffusion of electromobility is much less than we had assumed. As for the smart grids, they are still in development. The individual technologies already exist,
but how they work together, what the protocols are, who controls them, who regulates them,
who is being controlled,
who is being regulated,
how much decision-making autonomy will be left for the end users,
how much will he have to give away,
what happens with data security,
...So there are still many, many unresolved issues.
There is still no way to predict to what extent and at what level now what exactly will happen, but all of these merging systems always have opportunities and, at the same time, also risks.
The task now is to design them in such a way that you use as many of the opportunities as possible and minimize the risks.
Yes.
And if you have something like resilience backing up a development strategy,
then I think it can be done.
Before you fish in muddy waters, so to speak, and even before something has been developed,
I think it makes sense to stop and look at what the potential might be for ensuring security of supply in the future, taking into account the many uncertainties that we will have to deal with even more in the future.
-Yes. A method that you have presented,
an important method, is the vulnerability analysis, and I am quite sure that this is not particularly accessible for students,
so I would like to go a bit deeper with you. On the one hand, I hadn't realized how elaborate such an analysis is and also not at which level it can be done.
- We have done it now for the energy system, and on that level there are not many examples where this has already been done. - The energy system of northern Germany in the context of this-- - In this case it was northwest Germany, exactly.
This could be transferred to other regions or to the whole Federal Republic of Germany. There is a multitude of this type of analysis in the course of the climate adaptation discussion, but always with different focus areas.
Sometimes regions are analysed.
Sometimes sectors are analysed, as we have done now. Sometimes it's whole countries or only individual communities.
And every time, of course, the amount of work involved varies accordingly.
It depends on how detailed one would like to do this. This method actually originated more from the evaluation of natural hazards and the impact on regions and communities, villages, towns, areas, et cetera. The question, naturally, is:
How is the population affected by certain events? However, the methodology is also suitable for transferring to something like a supply system
and to ask how the fuel, the gas, the heat, or even the water supply is affected by very specific events.
And that is what we have done. The time it takes is, of course, dependent on
how much detail you want to go into.
We have now built it out a bit saying that
we're looking not only at the disturbances that we already know but also those that as a matter of principle we cannot know.
And then of course you have to look differently. That was exactly this idea that we do not have to look outside, but in the system itself.
- Where are the weaknesses? - How should I picture this?
You don't just count everything together and end up with "number X" that tells you, "Yes, high vulnerability," "No, low vulnerability." Rather, did you end up with a scenario?
What does the result look like?
The result looks like the table I presented.
You have the different columns for the energy system. Then, for the climate vulnerability and this structural vulnerability, entries for low, middle, high.
They are ultimately based on an expert assessment.
It helps when you have causal models like this.
You have a certain event,
like, as we said, flood or heat waves. You can then calculate
what's happening next in the energy network, what's happening next in the water supply,
what will happen next with the gas supply.
Then you see at the end, the pressure causes the frequency to fluctuate, and less comes out, or more, or something is missing.
This is possible in individual cases, but not always. As far as you can do this, you have a super basis for quantification.
This is not always possible, especially with such events where the probability is poorly known,
such as hail and storms.
With climate change now, weather is very local and also foreseen to be difficult to estimate whether the frequency and dimensions increase or decrease.
Then there are disturbances about which we know much less,
to the point that they are not known, and, of course, all the more difficult to make them the basis for such causal models. And then you sometimes have to reckon with scenarios and say, okay, there is such a certain range of possibilities.
From them, we take three:
strong signal, medium signal, and weak signal, and look at what would happen. If the system is not affected in all three cases,
then the vulnerability is slight, but if it is strongly affected in certain cases, and there is no capacity for adaptation,
then the vulnerability is high. But that can only be assessed with qualitative terms such as low-middle-high, which are derived from the extent to which or the way in which the service is affected. There is no one model that always brings the cause and the effect together, and then again together with the vulnerability. That only works in exceptional cases. - You said there are the known stressors, but also the unknown.
The unknown, by definition, can't be well assessed.
Nevertheless, can you give us an assessment
as to how much uncertainty then emerges from the known stressors and how strong is the influence of the unknown? - No, it can't be compared on that basis, because how much uncertainty emerges from something that one does not know...
I would say that the greatest uncertainty arises from the fact that one does not know, because you don't know it, while the others can be assessed relatively well.
- I wanted to focus somewhat on these black events...
- Well you can't know about them...
It goes back to this rather theoretical science realization that one cannot prove that
there are only white swans. You can only prove that there is a black one, so to speak. Yes, you can search for it.
And when you've done that, you've disproven that there are only white swans.
That works. But before you've found a black swan, you don't know if it's blue, or green, or yellow, or striped, or multicolored,
or if they simply do not exist.
That is to say
you can't really characterize what you've never encountered.
One can only say that there is potentially something there, and that is why we do not even look at the external event in the analysis.
We don't pretend that we can make it up, but we say we don't care what it is when it's something we do not know about yet.
A new virus or new characteristics of coupled systems that emit energy together and which did not exist before. There are disturbance waves spreading from this coupled system from electricity, gas and heat, for example.
No matter, now I know about it. We are not trying to do this, not at all, but we are saying, "Where is there a weak spot in this system that has not yet been secured at this moment?". This is what we are identifying without knowing what could trigger this vulnerability.
More uncertainty, of course, comes from things we do not know. But it is precisely there that we have lacked a procedure to arm ourselves against it.
In the second episode, you covered the design principles for resilient systems in such a matrix. You talked about the known and the unknown, and slow and creeping and fast and abrupt disruptions, and here you explained the four different abilities: adaptability, ability to innovate, resistance ability, and improvisational ability. Am I right in assuming that a resilient system, above all, includes all four abilities in order to be resilient?
Yes, that is the idea behind it.
Once again, this idea is that one is prepared against as many unknown dangers as possible. On the one hand against the known, this is still relatively simple.
But it's about the unknown, and if you want to characterize it, we must assume that all four characteristics are necessary, because it can be one of these four challenges, which result from the combination,
that may in fact occur, in the future. For certain sectors, which may well be undergoing very rapid change anyway,
where innovations follow each other very quickly, which constantly change the structure,
there is already a lot of capacity to adapt there and also the ability to innovate. Then perhaps one would have to concentrate on the other's abilities.
It may be that in certain cases, for certain regions, municipalities, sectors, or whatever one looks at - or systems - certain characteristics are already there anyway. Then one would try to develop the others. And that is then also the only emphasis I would place there. Otherwise, I would say a resilient system has precisely these four characteristics. But now l also have to narrow this down and say
both the vulnerability analysis relating to energy systems or to supply systems
as well as the development of resilience characteristics for such socio-technical systems,
are both still in the very early days, in my opinion.
What I have presented now are, so to speak, the first steps we are taking in this direction to really develop procedures out of this, or something like guidelines or instructions for action.
What does an energy supplier need to do to become resilient?
We are not yet at this level of concretization.
At the moment we are definitely doing more than simply developing visions.
It is also somewhat more than a mission statement.
These are already concrete guiding principles and structures and elements that can be used.
- But they have not yet been put into practice. - Yes, they have in fact. I have shown we have concrete examples of how to promote resilience, that is, the cooling of this data center or with the decentralized control and generation of electricity heaters and so on.
There are already approaches, but in what way do we have to combine them?
How many of them do we actually need?
And where is the end point?
I can imagine this without having proven it.
But the completely decentralized system, where each household has separate heat generation, fuel generation, and power generation, does not provide the most resilient variant because then, in this case, all these connections
- They have internal disturbances, right? - Or the backup system would fail.
They are no longer paid for.
Everyone thinks they can do it for themselves. For example, this leads to the, let us say, the general costs of the total supply.
No one can carry that anymore.
And those who cannot participate suddenly find themselves without supply.
In my opinion, this is also not resilient, just as the result of a completely central design of these systems is also not resilient.
You mentioned various criteria that support the resilience of energy systems, such as diversity, spatial distribution, modularity, redundancy, which are also factors that have economic effects.
If we want to achieve redundancy, I may have to pay more for a secure power grid. Is there the perception that energy system which has a good variety
is resilient?
Or is it really necessary for as many components as possible to interact? - I can't exchange these characteristics and components with one another.
Each component is responsible for a certain possibility of external stress or for a certain possibility of internal failure. Therefore, the buffers and the memory are there, for example, to buffer supply bottlenecks from outside, but the diversity has nothing to do with it.
They are there to be used, for example, to allow certain external influences, such as climate events, to affect only one component at a time,
because they are technologically diverse.
A coal-fired power station is completely different
from that which concerns climate change,
like a wind turbine, for example, and a good mixture - or a biomass power plant is affected differently from photovoltaics -
and it is important to have a good mixture, so that certain external factors always work only on one part and not on everything.
But I can only save a limited amount related to the amount of memory,
for example.
I can't say,
"Now I'll do a lot of one. I don't need the other one anymore."
So they are only substitutable to a limited extent.
One of the key messages of this learning unit from you was that this energy system is part of a great, fundamental change and is associated with increasing complexity at very different points.
Does this also mean that the actors involved in shaping this energy system need new coordination processes?
- Do you have a vision of what the coordination processes of a modern resilient energy system may look like? - I would say there would be such a hope
that the idea of a resilient energy system is on an equal footing with the discussion about a sustainable energy system in the sense of environmentally friendly, socially accepted, and so on. Everything that relates to sustainability.
Therefore, this needs to be discussed with fair burden-sharing and so on, and with an efficient, therefore cost-effective energy supply.
To raise this to a similar level, we must not only talk about sustainability and economic efficiency but also about this security of supply in the sense of resilience.
And if you have that at the level, then you have a common goal, and then these processes of unification still work.
As long as this is not a common goal, it is always somehow an add-on.
And nobody wants to pay for that.
Or some people want it, some people don't want it, because they feel affected or not, and to understand that this is an important criterion for the stability and security of supply
precisely because the future is uncertain and is becoming increasingly uncertain. When this has arrived at the level and agreement has been reached, then these processes of unification take place, in my opinion. - So your recommendation is not to put your own energy supply in the basement but rather to help shape the democratic processes? - Yes. This is a negotiation process.
How do we allow that to happen? Maybe you know about this novel "Blackout", about the biggest power outage in Europe, caused by a terrorist attack by hackers. When it comes to the cinemas and everyone has seen it, then the discussion will be different, I think at the moment a few have read about it and and some have not read about it. When everyone has finally seen it in real life, so to speak, this topic will be treated in a completely different way.
Because we simply have no experience with such an event.
- That's right. - Yes, we have no experience with large-scale failures and with what that means, and also what it means in terms of victims. When we have at least worked this out fictitiously, then this discussion about resilience will be conducted differently. Then it will probably pass into this consciousness of the democratic decision-making processes.
That is my hope at least.
Yes, that is a nice closing statement, and a reading recommendation as well.
Maybe we will talk again when the movie is out.
Then we can rework two lecture sessions.
Mr Gößling-Reisemann,
I would like to thank you very much.
And I hope you have taken more with you than just the reading recommendation.
Reflect on your habits and take many suggestions with you.
Thank you very much and goodbye.