Fostering Climate Resilient Electricity Infrastructures

Heat waves, hurricanes, floods and windstorms - recent years have seen dramatic failures in electricity infrastructures sparked by short-term departures of environmental conditions from their norms. Driven by a changing climate, such deviations are anticipated to increase in severity and/or frequency over the coming decades. This will have important implications for the systems that supply and transport our electricity. In light of this, resilience is an essential characteristic of future infrastructure systems. The notion of resilience implicitly accepts the possibility of unforeseen disruptions and failures and focuses on the capacity of systems to handle them - to survive unexpected perturbation, recover from adversity and gracefully degrade - as well as an ability to adapt and learn over time. How can we foster a climate resilient electricity infrastructure in the Netherlands? To address this question, this thesis synthesizes insights from multiple computer models using multiple modeling techniques. These models stress the nature of the electricity infrastructure as a complex and evolving system, interconnected within itself and with other infrastructures. Beyond these insights, the thesis contributes a framework, an approach and a set of tools for supporting the development of climate resilient electricity infrastructures in the Netherlands and elsewhere.ESSTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Export, metal recovery and the mobile phone end-of-life ecosystem

Against a background of rapidly growing mobile phone consumption in developing and emerging economies, falling use times and looming metal scarcity, finding better ways to deal with end-of-life (EoL) phones is imperative. The current dynamic in which large numbers of EoL phones are exported from industrialized to developing and emerging economies results in the loss of significant amounts of scarce and valuable metals. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the dynamic of EoL mobile phone flows from industrialized to developing economies – what drives it, how does it hinder metal recovery and how can this be changed? The first part of the paper provides an overview of the various components of this dynamic - collection processes in industrialized countries, export flows, and refurbishing and metal recovery operations in developing and emerging economies. The second part of the paper extracts insights from the results of three simulation models - one system dynamics model and two agent-based models - dealing with various aspects of this dynamic. The first model, with a global scope, indicates towards the potential relevance of reuse in developing and emerging economies in facilitating EoL phone collection in the industrialized world. The second model, also taking a global scope, indicates that high levels of reuse in the developing world alone are unlikely to create a situation that is both environmentally and economically sustainable, and emphasizes the need to improve recyling infrudtructure and metal recovery processes. The third model adopts a more local scope, focusing on the informal e-waste sector in Bangalore, India. Preliminary results from this model highlight some factors that can play a role in supporting the development of partnerships between small-scale recyclers and professional end refiners for the purpose of improving metal recovery.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Resilience and adaptability of infrastructures: A complex adaptive systems perspective

While we rely on the continuous functioning of infrastructures such as water, electricity and Internet, 100% uptime is not possible. Infrastructure systems must therefore be resilient – they must be capable of flexing in response to disruptions and recovering quickly. In this paper we explore options for supporting infrastructure resilience from a complex adaptive systems perspective. Building on work from the field of social-ecological systems, we introduce a novel definition of infrastructure resilience - the capacity to manage shifts between attractors in infrastructure operation. We define adaptability as the capacity to manage shifts between attractors in infrastructure evolution. To explore the usefulness of these definitions, we introduce a simulation model of an electricity network exposed to perturbations in its environment. The results of this model demonstrate how an evolutionary-level attractor shift leads to greater resilience of the modeled infrastructure. This model and the elaborated definitions can help to guide the development of future models for supporting infrastructure resilience and adaptability in line with a complex adaptive systems perspective.Infrastructures, Systems and ServicesTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Editorial: Special Issue on Climate Adaptation of Infrastructure Networks

Transport and LogisticsTransport and PlanningEnergy & Industr

Market integration of local energy systems: Is local energy management compatible with European regulation for retail competition?

The growing penetration of distributed energy resources is opening up opportunities for local energy management (LEM) – the coordination of decentralized energy supply, storage, transport, conversion and consumption within a given geographical area. Because European electricity market liberalization concentrates competition at the wholesale level, local energy management at the distribution level is likely to impose new roles and responsibilities on existing and/or new actors. This paper provides insights into the appropriateness of organizational models for flexibility management to guarantee retail competition and feasibility for upscaling. By means of a new analytical framework three projects in the Netherlands and one in Germany have been analysed. Both the local aggregator and dynamic pricing projects present potentials for retail competition and feasibility of upscaling in Europe.Energy & IndustryEconomics of Technology and Innovatio