Vulnerability Assessment for Interdependent Gas and Electricity Networks

Strong coupling between the gas and electricity infrastructure introduces new kinds of vulnerabilities in energy systems. Identification and assessment of these vulnerabilities is a challenging task because of the complexity of the system and the non-trivial role of the weather, which is inherently random. Prolonged periods of cold weather can dramatically amplify the negative effect of common failure of the equipment. We propose a methodology for identification of the most dangerous scenarios that combine the outage of individual system components with unfavorable weather conditions in a system of coupled gas and electricity. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated on simulations of a detailed model of coupled Gas and Electricity infrastructures in Europe.