Potentials of sector coupling to improve the resilience of electricity and gas networks

Global warming leads to an increase in extreme weather events that considerably threaten critical infrastructures (e.g., electricity or gas networks). The failure of one critical infrastructure may have far-reaching consequences triggering a “cascade of failures” that affects other critical infrastructures. As extreme weather events usually hit affected regions unexpectedly, flexibility in energy systems is key to sustain resilience and rapidly respond to changing conditions, e.g., failed network lines. Hence, we analyze sector coupling (SC) as one option to increase flexibility and exploit synergies between electricity and gas networks. We investigate SC investments that allow for a bi-directional conversion of gas and electricity in the form of gas-fired power plants or power-to-X technologies and their effect on resilience. We propose a two-level market model where, in the upper-level problem, long-term investments in SC technologies are made in anticipation of short-term market clearing as well as uncertain failures and, in the lower-level problem, SC technologies may be activated. We model extreme weather events as a set of discrete scenarios that pose an external risk to the energy system. In our paper, we derive optimal SC investments representing a trade-off between enhancing system resilience and increasing investments. Moreover, we derive optimal SC responses for selected weather events to guide the operation of SC plants under extreme conditions.