A Review of Multi-Energy Systems from Resiliency and Equity Perspectives

Abstract

Energy infrastructure systems need to maintain resilient operation in the presence of more intense and frequent disasters, which are disproportionately challenging for low-income and disadvantaged communities. Leveraging local natural resources with renewable energy sharing opportunities, multi-energy systems (MES) – or energy hubs – are technologically viable solutions to this challenge, but their wide-scale adoption for these purposes are not well understood. To this end, this paper comprehensively reviews MES literature from both resiliency and equity perspectives. The goal is to understand synergies and disparities among literature regarding these two perspectives, under a changing climate and a long-term goal of decarbonization. The results found that papers including equity are statically more likely to involve fully renewable energy systems (highly significant, p<0.001), while middle income countries tend to adopt renewable/carbon-producing energy systems more frequently than high income countries (weakly significant, p=0.011). Mobile storages are implemented independently of resilience and equity scopes, and it is increasingly common to integrate multiple storage types within a MES. Sector coupling with two energy types improved the resiliency index the most (73% difference between baseline and proposed MES), suggesting two-type systems are favorable compared to single-networks or more complex configurations. While some preliminary studies indicate lower operational costs and higher resilience can synergistically be achieved, more MES case studies are required to understand the life cycle costs of resilient design and operating schemes.