Risk, Safety and Societal Acceptance

The exploitation of underground energy resources as well as the use and expansion of hydropower are, like any other energy technology, not risk free. To address this risk, we develop upon the holistic concept of risk governance and community resilience, advocating a broad picture of risk: In addition to risk analysis and risk management, we also investigate how risk-related decision-making unfolds when a range of actors is involved. This requires coordination and possibly reconciliation between a profusion of roles, perspectives, goals and activities. Developments include: a rigorous common methodology and a consistent modelling approach to hazard, vulnerability, risk, resilience and societal acceptance assessment of energy technologies; a stress test framework and its application to assess the vulnerability and resilience of individual critical energy infrastructures, as well as the first level of interdependencies among these infrastructures; standardized protocols, operational guidelines and/or softwares for monitoring strategies, hazard and risk assessment during all project phases (including real-time procedures), and finally for mitigation and related communication strategies.

In phase II, the main activities of the group are in continuation with phase I but with increased interactions with Swiss P&D projects, including industrial ones and research underground labs. New applications are being developed and tested for induced seismicity risk mitigation. Those are also refined based on P&D project feedback. The main innovations in phase II are the testing of more sophisticated traffic-light systems and the inclusion of seismic risk models in economic models (including energy modelling, cost-benefit analyses and decision making under uncertainty). For the latter, interactions with SCCER CREST via a joint activity will help move forward with some legislative recommendations.