ReMoDigital: Resilience-Monitoring for the digitization of the energy transition

Against the background of the structural change in the energy system with more fluctuating provision of energy, extensive sector coupling and digitization of these processes, new actors and changed roles compared to today, the functionality of the energy system and its resilience should be examined more intensively (resilience is the ability to quickly restore essential system functions after disturbances caused by stabilizing and dynamic elements) (see Renn 2017). In ReMoDigital, an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary concept for the resilient design of the digital energy transition is to be developed, as well as a resilience monitoring, the core of which is a stress test instrument. ZIRIUS participates in an accompanying project group in the development of the basics and concept for resilience and resilience monitoring.

The functionality of the future German energy system will also be significantly shaped by social, political and environmental contexts; at the same time, decisions about the technological direction will also influence society's ideas about and uses of energy (Smith and Stirling 2010). This understanding of the energy system as a “socio-technical system” (Büschen and Schippl 2013) has meanwhile found a broad consensus in interdisciplinary energy research and must also be integrated into resilience monitoring. With this in mind, ZIRIUS pursues the following additional goals in the project: first, potential social and environmentally relevant events and trends are identified that can significantly influence the resilience of the future energy system. And secondly, the interactions between social and environmental contextual conditions and technological directional decisions are systematically analyzed using the Cross-Impact Balance Analysis (CIB).

The central output of the sub-project is the development of consistent and plausible context scenarios in which critical social and environmentally relevant events are processed that can significantly influence the resilience of the future energy system. The context scenarios developed in a transdisciplinary manner are integrated as a central component in the resilience monitoring and processed in such a way that they are transparently and interactively available to users of the monitoring.

Literature:
Renn, O. et al. (2017) Das Energiesystem resilient gestalten: Szenarien – Handlungsspielräume – Zielkonflikte, Schriftenreihe Energiesysteme der Zukunft, acatech, München.

Smith, A.; Stirling, A. (2010) The politics of social-ecological resilience and sustainable socio-technical transitions, Ecology and Society 15(1): 11.

Büschen, C.; Schippl, J. (2013) Die Transformation der Energieversorgung: Einheit und Differenz soziotechnischer Systeme, TaTuP Technikfolgenabschätzung Theorie und Praxis 22(2):11- 19.