RECIPE

Contact: Prof. Giovanni Sansavini; Blazhe Gjorgiev

This project, sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy under the SWEET programme Critical Infrastructures, Climate Change, and Resilience of the Swiss Energy System, is a collaborative effort between the ETH Zurich EPFL, Swisscom, Infras, FHNW, HSLU, Zoï. The RECIPE consortium is led by Prof. Giovanni Sansavini from the RRE group at ETH Zurich.

In the coming decades, Switzerland will be undergoing two major changes. On the one hand, its energy system will be progressively transformed to a system with net-zero CO2 emissions, according to the Energy Strategy 2050. On the other hand, the ongoing climate change is expected to manifest itself with increasing intensity, most notably by means of extreme weather events. Due to the crucial importance of uninterrupted energy supply for the Swiss economy, population well-being and vital resources, it is imperative to timely identify the risks and the appropriate mitigation measures. The four participating universities and three private sector partners of the RECIPE (Resilient Infrastructure for the Swiss Energy Transition) consortium will analyse the hazards posed to the Swiss energy infrastructure by the transition of the energy system and climate change, and the associated risks to the economy, society, vital resources, and the ecosystem. For the identified risks and vulnerabilities, the consortium will propose appropriate measures to increase resilience. Finally, RECIPE will provide actionable recommendations to stakeholders based on the project analyses and findings.

To achieve the aforementioned objectives, a set of hazards against which the Swiss energy infrastructure can be vulnerable will be identified by engaging a transdisciplinary team of experts. Hazard scenarios and vulnerability storylines will be articulated. The criticality of each energy infrastructure type will be estimated per hazard and per considered energy system evolution and climate change scenario. Criticality will be measured in terms of the impact on the Swiss economy, society, vital resources, and ecosystem. For the identified risks and vulnerabilities, appropriate resilience enhancement measures will be proposed by the consortium. Considered measures will include (i) adding new or maintaining existing energy infrastructure, (ii) new operational, asset management or monitoring processes allowing to properly and timely react to hazardous events, and (iii) non-technical measures, such as devising targeted policies or enhancing the resilience of the Swiss economy to energy disruptions.

Key contributions by the RRE Lab:

The Reliability and Risk Engineering Lab plays a central role in:

1. Project management
   • Consortium leadership.
   • Work package leadership.
2. Research and modeling:
   • Infrastructure criticality assessment will be performed by means of expert assessment and modelling.
   • Risk analyses will be performed by conventional methods considering the hazard scenario, the likelihood of occurrence of the hazard and estimated consequences of the hazard, complemented by advanced sampling techniques for rare event detection.
   • Strategic planning will be performed for resilience under uncertainties (climate change, energy transition) using computational tools to explore a large and complex solution space.
     
   • The Resiliometer will be developed as a tool for interactive visualization to increase the accessibility, transferability, and actionability of RECIPE’s results. Therefore, the Resiliometer acts as a knowledge transfer platform, translating the knowledge from in-depth technical analyses to high-level actionable results.