Enhancing security of critical infrastructures in transition to renewable electricity system – A systematic review

An electrical power system is considered a critical infrastructure (CI) interlinked with other CIs such as transportation, water and information and communication systems essential for maintaining vital societal functions. During the last two decades while power systems have become cleaner and smarter, with decentralised and digitalized green energy supply, different high-power low-probability events (HILPs) caused by climate disasters, human factors, cyberattacks, intentional disturbances and terrorist activities have emerged creating new safety and fault complexity issues for the networked electrical power system operations. Transition to green electrification entails technical advancements of distributed generation, microgrids, smart grids, hybrid data-driven control and energy storage systems that offer considerable benefits for reinforcing resilience of the energy CI but expose the underlying systems to a number of risks at the same time. Hence, higher requirements have been put forward by EU, IEA and states for energy supply security indicating needs for enhancing both technical and operational resilience of critical entities operating, owning and managing CIs. As interconnectedness and interdependence among CIs and different systems are increasing with higher risks for cascading effects, there is a growing need for a holistic perspective that transcends both individual operator boundaries and sectoral confines while ensuring secure and resilient operations of the energy CIs. This paper presents a systematic review aiming to contribute to comprehensive understanding on how the recent state-of-the-art interdisciplinary literature on energy transition approaches the security challenge of deployment, delivery and integration of variable renewable energy sources into the power system and protection of the CIs against emerging hazards. The primary aim leads to explore and in-depth understand the diverse practices available to address resilience-building of stakeholders responsible for energy CIs regarding risks to their operations that could result in the disruption of provision of essential services. In this paper, current literature is reviewed by following a systematic review process based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. The study is conducted through firstly bibliometric findings of the past five years from three reference databases – Web of Science, ScienceDirect (Elsevier) and Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO) –and then via an in-depth descriptive content analysis. The paper identifies, synthesizes, interrelates and describes results of peer-reviewed papers and proposed solutions on qualitative approaches for managing security and resilience challenges of the energy CIs by extracting relevant knowledge from thematic full-text analyses. The review results are intended to support scholars dealing with resilience of energy CIs particularly from stakeholders’ perspectives.