Resilience Implications of Energy Storage in Urban Water Systems

Additional water storage is modeled in concentrated and distributed configurations in a case study water distribution system model of Cleveland, Tennessee, U.S.A. This is done to understand: if there are energy generation capabilities from increased storage, and if new water demand modeled to represent a doubling population can be supported by additional water storage. Model outputs show that the distributed water storage configuration increases water system resiliency to population growth, meeting doubled water demand. The concentrated storage configuration cannot meet doubled water demand, due to the inability of the design to manage pressure and deliver water across the space-and-time continuum. Both scenarios are unable to meet water demands and maintain pressures while also generating energy. This research concludes that the primary motivation for adding additional water storage (e.g., for energy generation or to withstand chronic population growth) should determine additional tank locations and configurations

POWER DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM RELIABILITY AND RESILIENCY AGAINST EXTREME EVENTS

The objective of a power system is to provide electricity to its customers as economically as possible with an acceptable level of reliability while safeguarding the environment. Power system reliability has well-established quantitative metrics, regulatory standards, compliance incentives and jurisdictions of responsibilities. The increase in occurrence of extreme events like hurricane/tornadoes, floods, wildfires, storms, cyber-attacks etc. which are not considered in routine reliability evaluation has raised concern over the potential economic losses due to prolonged and large-scale power outages, and the overall sustainability and adaptability of power systems. This concern has motivated the utility planners, operators, and policy makers to acknowledge the importance of system resiliency against such events. However, power system resiliency evaluation is comparatively new, and lacks widely accepted standards, assessment methods and metrics. The thesis presents comparative review and analysis of power system resilience models, methodologies, and metrics in present literature and utility applications. It presents studies on two very different types of extreme events, (i) man-made and (ii) natural disaster, and analyzes their impacts on the resiliency of a distribution system. It draws conclusions on assessing and improving power system resiliency based on the impact of the extreme event, response from the distribution system, and effectiveness of the mitigating measures to tackle the extreme event. The advancement in technologies has seen an increasing integration of cyber and physical layer of the distribution system. The distribution system operators avails from the symbiotic relation of the cyber-physical layer, but the interdependency has also been its Achilles heel. The evolving infrastructure is being exposed to increase in cyber-attacks. It is of paramount importance to address the aforementioned issue by developing holistic approaches to comprehensibly upgrade the distribution system preventing huge financial loss and societal repercussions. The thesis models a type of cyber-attack using false data injection and evaluates its impact on the distribution system. It does so by developing a resilience assessment methodology accompanied by quantitative metrics. It also performs reliability evaluation to present the underlying principle and differences between reliability and resiliency. The thesis also introduces new indices to demonstrate the effectiveness of a bad-data detection strategy against such cyber-attacks. Extreme events like hurricane/tornadoes, floods, wildfires, storm, cyber-attack etc. are responsible for catastrophic damage to critical infrastructure and huge financial loss. Power distribution system is an important critical infrastructure driving the socio-economic growth of the country. High winds are one of the most common form of extreme events that are responsible for outages due to failure of poles, equipment damage etc. The thesis models effective extreme wind events with the help of fragility curves, and presents an analysis of their impacts on the distribution system. It also presents infrastructural and operational resiliency enhancement strategies and quantifies the effectiveness of the strategy with the metrics developed. It also demonstrates the dependency of resiliency of distribution system on the structural strength of transmission lines and presents measures to ensure the independency of the distribution system. The thesis presents effective resilience assessment methodology that can be valuable for distribution system utility planners, and operators to plan and ensure a resilient distribution system

Fostering resilience-oriented thinking in engineering practice

Round tables discussing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems held in the UK, the USA and New Zealand have provided insight into how organisations are changing the basis of planning and investment decisions to enhance resilience. The events convened stakeholders to explore how resilience is embraced in their sectors and to identify how to advance practice. The overarching premise was to convene a diverse group who would not typically have an opportunity to engage with each other, to share their perspectives on putting resilience thinking into practice. The round tables identified that early-adopting organisations are implementing approaches to decision making that embrace resilience thinking, but such approaches are not yet embedded in common practice across organisations that are responsible for planning and managing critical infrastructure. The findings emphasise that multi-agency coordination and collaboration is required to advance resilience thinking in professional practice and to move beyond traditional risk-based paradigms. Governance and policy interventions will help encourage cross-sector information sharing and enforce responsibility and transparency surrounding exposure to potential shocks and stresses. It is recommended that such interventions could expand on principles and practice in existing emergency-management efforts, on the basis that such efforts are founded on coordinating various groups. </jats:p

Analysis of Resilience Situations for Complex Engineered Systems – the Resilience Holon

Improving the resilience of complex engineered and engineering systems (CES) includes planning for complex resilience situations, in which there may be multiple threats, interactions, and disruptions. One challenge in the modeling of CES is the identification of how interactions in a complex situation occur and their combined influence on CES resilience. This article presents a resilience holon that can be used to analyze complex resilience situations. It is made up of 24 elements (defining types of resilience, threats, interactions, and disruptions), which have varying importance to specific situations. Holons can be linked together hierarchically or in a network. An application of the resilience holon to a documented real-world resilience situation, widespread flooding in a city, illustrates its use. Pathways taken by threats and disruptions, as the flood effects cascaded through the city, are shown as connections between holons. The resilience holon could be used to decompose diverse resilience situations involving CES, to identify where critical vulnerability points are and how the whole resilience situation could be improved. The visual nature of the resilience holon could be used in an interactive way, allowing stakeholders to better understand the full resilience picture of CES that they use or operate

The future(s) of construction: a sustainable built environment for now and the future

The global construction industry creates high-profile structures and critical infrastructure systems, yet is frequently rebuked for its frequent poor performance and lack of forward thinking and future planning. Looking to the future, the industry is likely to be driven by a combination of evolving national and international policy on sustainability, the legacy of the local and global economic problems and the increasing pace of technological innovation. In the longer term, a more complicated and inter-related collection of drivers is at play, including demographic shifts, policy and societal evolutions, energy and water security, as well as sustainability pressures such as the changing climate and its effect on the resilience of our critical infrastructures. A more futures-orientated and inter-connected approach to global construction, projects and practices, is therefore required in order to create a truly sustainable industry, and hence planet, for all. Only by planning ahead for the longer term, and working together at a local and global level, can the global construction industry hope to move forwards collectively to creating a truly sustainable and resilient built environment, fit for purpose, fit for now, but also fit for the long term

On Decision Support for Sustainability and Resilience of Infrastructure Systems

An overview of selected contributions across the different sciences to sustainability and resilience research is provided and discussed. A general frame-work for supporting decisions for sustainable and resilient design and management of societal infrastructures is then proposed taking basis in Bayesian decision analysis and probabilistic systems performance modelling. A principal example for decision support at regulatory level is presented for a coupled system comprised of infrastructure, social, hazard and environmental subsystems. The infrastructure systems is modelled as multi-component Daniels system generating benefits over time after deduction of potential losses due to disturbance events. The societal system is represented in terms of the preparedness level with respect to respond, reorganize and rehabilitate functionality after disturbances and the environmental system is represented in terms of local and global scale constraints concerning acceptable emissions

Agricultural water supply system resilience

Resilience is an essential key of the assessment of water resources system management. Adequate description of the resilience of water resource systems needs to consider the emergent properties arising from the interaction of the component subsystems. This paper presents an approach to assess resilience in an agricultural water supply system. The system is contextualized as a meta-system composed of three subsystems; the natural catchment and reservoirs, the water distribution infrastructure and agricultural users. The proposed approach allows studying each sub-system separately to determine its properties, quantify the interdependencies between the subsystems and integrate pressures that affect the operation of each sub-system and, consequently, the system in its entirety. This work is a first step in assessing agricultural water resources' resilience under climatic and anthropogenic pressures in agricultural water resources system. Keywords: Resilience, agricultural water resources system, climatic and anthropogenic pressure