Cellular energy architecture to secure resilient energy supply for critical infrastructure

Introduction of renewable energy systems offers the opportunity to achieve energy self-sufficiency or autarky in addition to contributing towards carbon neutrality by reducing the dependency on energy logistics. Amidst growing geo-political conflicts, the scenario of energy shortage or disruption of energy logistics is a major threat, especially for Europe due to the significant reliance on import of primary energy. Achieving autarky, however, requires a distinction between energy consumers that need uninterrupted energy supply and consumers that could potentially be cut-off during energy shortages to avoid prohibitive costs resulting from over sizing the system. Critical infrastructure such as hospitals, communication systems, emergency services and key mobility nodes like fuelling stations and charging points needed to sustain the services provided by them, always need uninterrupted energy supply. The architecture in current tools for optimising the design and operation of distributed energy systems are unable to distinguish and prioritise such critical consumers. Therefore, a cellular architecture is proposed to prioritise energy flows to critical consumers even under shortage of energy supply. In the proposed architecture, components of a macro-system, termed the „Energy Organism “, are grouped into energy cells. The energy cells are then assigned priorities based on criticality. Although the concept of energy cells is not new, its implementation in designing resilient energy systems is less explored. A proof-of-concept is presented in the simulation framework ENERsim to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept taking a village quarter consisting of external energy supply, distributed energy resources, critical and non-critical consumers as example. An improved energy system design for the macro-system is demonstrated by including the ability of the critical cells to interact with neighbouring non-critical cells, potentially accessing back-up reserves under multiple simulated disruptive scenarios.