Sustainability of integrated energy systems: A performance-based resilience assessment methodology

One of the key elements of any community or facility is the integrated energy system (IES) which consists of utility power plants, distributed generation systems, and building heating and cooling systems. Assessing the sustainability of an IES would be of great value to decision-making relevant to design, future growth planning, and operation of such systems. This paper addresses one of the basic issues in this regard, i.e. resilience assessment and quantification of IES. A new performance-based method for characterizing and assessing resilience of multi-functional demand-side engineered systems is proposed in this study. Through modeling of system response to potential internal and external failures (called failure modes) during different operational temporal periods (such as different diurnal and seasonal periods of the year), the proposed methodology quantifies resilience of the system based upon loss in the services which the system is designed to deliver. A three-dimensional matrix, called Loss Matrix, is introduced whose elements represent the undelivered system services under different scenarios, i.e. combinations of failure modes and different operational temporal periods. Assigning monetary penalty costs to such losses and including them in the objective function of an optimization model of the entire system allows the three-dimension loss matrix to be reframed into a two-dimensional Consequence Matrix where individual elements represent the imposed penalty costs to the system stakeholders due to undelivered services and/or non-optimal system performance. Normalizing the individual elements results in the Resilience Matrix of the system for different scenarios. The developed methodology is illustrated for IES of a large office building serves to satisfy critical and noncritical electrical, heating, and cooling loads. The resilience assessment framework proposed in this paper would serve as a mean to identify critical components of a particular IES, thereby facilitating resilient design and operation, and also to evaluate cost-effective resilience enhancement strategies.