Integrated Operational Security of Multi-energy Systems: Concepts, Features and Mechanism

With the development of energy coupling components such as combined heat and power (CHP) units, heat pumps, and air conditioners, multi-energy systems (MES) play important roles in energy supply. Integrated operational security becomes more significant due to the complex interactions among different energy systems and huge economic and social costs of large-scale energy outages. This paper proposed concepts of integrated operational security of MES, which has new features of multi-energy coupling, multi-time scale, and multimanagement body. Interactions among systems are the causes of integrated operational security problems, and the security problems can evolve over time. Cascading failures have great impacts, and are analyzed specifically. A case study showed a cascading failure in a combined electricity and heating system.