Contribution of Diversity to the Resilience of Energy Systems – A literature Review

The concept of resilience has attracted an increasing attention of the research community in different fields within the last decades. In our understanding, resilience is a (socio-technical) system’s ability to maintain its services under stress and in turbulent conditions. We state that certain design principles and system elements, e.g. ‘diversity’ contribute more strongly to a resilient system design than others. For this review, more than 40 publications regarding the resilience enhancing capabilities of diversity in energy systems, were analyzed using the following research questions: 1) Which components of an energy system need to be diversified in order to increase its resilience? 2) How can these components be diversified and to what degree is that favorable? 3) To what extent does diversification contribute to preparing the system against unknown threats? The literature review showed that there is an agreement about which elements should be prioritized when diversifying energy systems, e.g. generation, fuel supply. Also diversity is already known to the community from reliability engineering of energy systems. On the other question, as to what degree of diversity is favorable; no consensus and no concrete design instructions were found. Hence, we conclude that, it remains an open research question to find the proper degree of diversity for energy systems and socio-technical systems, and to explain how it contributes to overcoming unknown threats.