Enhancing Resilience of Sustainable Energy Infrastructure: Best Practices in Thailand

Countries around the world are increasing the share of renewable energy in their energy mix to respond to the global call for sustainable development. Renewable energy infrastructure possesses different vulnerabilities from conventional fossil fuel power plants, and climate change is exacerbating the threats to the power system. Thailand developed a framework to evaluate risks and contribute to resilience enhancement of renewable energy systems based on the approach of National Renewable Energy Laboratory with some modifications to ensure the ability to assess recoverability and adaptability. The modified methodology was applied to case studies of four different renewable power plants in Thailand, including a 700 kW state-owned solar power plant, a 100 kW rural solar microgrid, a 4.9 MW commercial biomass power plant, and a community biogas plant with a 60 kVA generator. It was found that the proposed framework has comparable capability to conventional risk assessments in identifying risks for energy infrastructure. It results in readily applicable resilience measures as it is based on stakeholders’ experience. It has a future-focused nature which helps enhance power plants’ adaptive capacity and can anticipate change of risks over time which facilitates fast recovery. It can reduce opportunity loss and enhance profitability for a commercial power plant and ensure continuous operability of a community power plant. From the four case studies, it was found that the proposed framework is suitable for solar power plants. As the threats and vulnerabilities are not very complicated, the stakeholders could easily evaluate their frequency and severity. The identified risks and resilience measures were those overlooked by the operators, making the assessment useful for the owners. This led to the development of ASEAN Energy Resilience Assessment Guideline which focuses on solar power plants.