Climate change adaptation with energy resilience in energy districts—A state-of-the-art review

Abstract

Energy efficiency, flexibility, and robustness can promote system sustainability and decarbonization under low-impact and high-probability events, whereas energy resilience is significant to survive power systems when suffering from high-impact and low-probability events. However, energy resilience is at its pregnancy stage with inconsistency in multiple perspectives, ranging from concept definition to quantification approach. Moreover, the consideration of energy resilience will conflict with energy efficiency, calling for the necessity on trade-off solutions. In this study, in order to ensure the survivability of district power systems when suffering from extreme events, an up-to-date review on concept definition and quantification approach of energy resilience was conducted, together with distinguished boundary and correlation with reliability, robustness, and flexibility in multi-energy systems. Recent advancement in distributed renewable systems, electric vehicles, peer-to-peer energy sharing, electrification and hydrogenation in power systems was provided, together with their potential contributions in future smart energy systems. By enabling each agent to become a power supply agent, a typology transformation from centralized to distributed energy prosumers was proposed, with an intermediate step-by-step transition from centralized power plants to distributed energy prosumers. Afterwards, multi-scale applications and future prospects of energy resilience are provided, including resilient heating/cooling of buildings, dynamical downscaling for robust design on urban morphology, mobility-based interactive energy sharing in regional districts, and smart microgrids with V2X (vehicle-to-everything) and energy flexible buildings. This study can highlight the significance in district energy resilience with joint and continuous endeavors and tradeoff solutions, during energy planning, design and operation stages.