Resilience
Start: 2015
End: 2018
Summary:
A necessary condition for sustainable development involves the ability of technical, ecological, economic and social systems to respond to perturbations in such a way that their functioning and development potential is guaranteed. The main goal of this project is to characterize and identify institutional, social and physical design properties of resilient socio-technical systems from a holistic viewpoint, using the energy transport and actor system as an example. It brings together concepts and methods from physics, engineering, economics and the social sciences in an integrated way. Of particular interests are the impact of fluctuations and slow changes in environmental and economic conditions which might give rise to qualitatively new system behavior like emerging new states, tipping points or extreme events.
Work packages
Constellation Analysis: The constellation analysis explicates essential elements of the energy transport systems. It serves to jointly agree on the research object and terminology in the interdisciplinary team, and to become precise about the interlinkages between scientific work packages.
Discourse Analysis: We will undertake a program of discourse analyses on the social system of the German Energiewende as a case study. The task of exploring principles and ways of social distribution and emergence of values, meanings/opinions, interests, and practices are of focused consideration. A recent example in the context of the Energiewende is the resistance of locally affected communities in connection with the installation of a new north- south route for the necessary expansion of the supply network.
Networks: As a novel approach in network theory we couple very different models for the dynamics on the nodes of the subnetworks: physical models for the technical units (energy production and consumption) and agent-based and opinion formation models for actors based on deterministic (long time scales) and stochastic (short time scales, e.g. fluctuations in renewable energy production or spontaneous decisions of actors) dynamics.
Regulation: This work package analyzes institutional options for a long-term transformation of electricity transport and actor systems on the time scale of decades. It provides an in-depth understanding of how (i) different mechanisms for grid regulation set incentives for investment in capacity redundancy and resilient grid topologies, (ii) how this relates to social norms that are crucial determinants of regulatory policy. This analysis will employ concepts from regulatory economics, based on qualitative methods and dynamic analytical models that are linked to methods from nonlinear dynamics.
Stochastics: In interacting subnetworks (social, economical as well as technical) stochasticity plays a crucial role. On one side the growing integration of renewable energy will increase the shares of intrinsically fluctuating energy sources. The generic description of the renewable energies requires the development of appropriate stochastic models, including correlated and jump noise. In an analogue way the behavior of the socioeconomic subnetworks can be transferred in a mathematical model where both deterministic tendencies also uncertain aspects shall be grasped by a stochastic ansatz comprising in the sense of Markov processes stochastic with deterministic contributions.
Researcher: Jasper N. Meya
Lead Overall Project: Prof. Dr. Klaus Eisenack
Funding: VW-Stiftung / Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Central Achievements:
Hamborg, Steffen, Jasper N. Meya, Klaus Eisenack, and Thorsten Raabe. 2020. “Rethinking Resilience: A Cross-Epistemic Resilience Framework for Interdisciplinary Energy Research.” Energy Research & Social Science 59 (January): 101285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101285.
Barth, J., K. Eisenack, Feudel, U. and J.N. Meya (2017): Dynamic quality regulation of the electricity grid. Presented at EAERE 2017 and IAEE 2017. https://www.eeg.tuwien.ac.at/confer-ence/iaee2017/files/paper/555_Barth_fullpaper_2017-06-29_10-58.pdf
Eisenack, K. (2016): Institutional adaptation to cooling water scarcity in the electricity sector under global warming, Ecological Economics 124, 153-163.
Hamborg, S., J.N. Meya, Eisenack, K. and T. Raabe (2018): A resilience framework for interdisciplinary research on electricity systems.
Meya, J.N., P. Neetzow, L. Neubauer and A. Pechan (2016): Die Menge macht’s? Das EEG 2017 und die Folgen für die deutsche Energiewende. Energiewirtschaftliche Tagesfragen, 66(11), 34-37.