External Resilience Assessment of Energy Critical Infrastructures

Energy Critical Infrastructures represent the most important sector of the Critical Infrastructure system. Not only the population depends on their service and supply continuity, but also all the sectors of Critical Infrastructures considered necessary for the functioning of society. Due to this reason, it is important that the Energy Critical Infrastructures achieve a high level of resilience capacity towards all types of hazards. This resilience can be perceived in the context of the environment either as internal or external. While the internal resilience of Energy Critical Infrastructures is ensured by critical entities (i.e. infrastructure owners/operators), external resilience is shaped by the external environment in which these infrastructures are located. The assessment of external resilience is currently still receiving insufficient attention though. Addressing this gap, the subject of this chapter is the presentation of the created approach on the assessment of the external resilience of Energy Critical Infrastructures in the context of the territorial unit disaster preparedness. It is also possible to consider the formulation of the aspect of external resilience as beneficial, which complements the existing framework of approaches to the implementation of internal resilience. The chapter is divided into three main parts, mainly investigating the importance and status of external resilience, the basic principles of external resilience assessment methodology, and the process for Energy Critical Infrastructures’ external resilience assessment. At the end of the chapter, a case study of territorial unit disaster preparedness assessment with relation to the external resilience of the Energy Critical Infrastructures external resilience is presented.