Pathways to resilience: Contrasting power systems’ resilience between Uganda and the United Kingdom

The concept of resilience has been previously studied for the planning, development, and operation of the electricity supply industry (ESI) driven by the increasing complexity, intensity, frequency, duration, and extent of extreme events. However, some problems remain such as inherent uncertainties within and in the choice of data, irregular assignment of homogeneous threats to vast regions, system-centric resilience analysis, and limited comparative analyses of countries with contrary development statuses. These gaps were addressed by synthesizing the prevailing conceptions of resilience into evaluation frameworks and applying them to historical and projected use cases in the United Kingdom (UK) and Uganda. A synthesis of the literature on resilience presents the concept to mean the capacity to prevent, anticipate, absorb, adapt, recover, and transform to maintain operations, minimise consequences, and enhance system performance to the utmost benefit of people’s well-being before, during and after extreme events. Drawing from human development theory, the study formulated resilience as both a necessity and an outcome of development and proposed a framework and indicators for its evaluation against historical events. The 303 indicators were classified into 13 goals (development commitments), 4 components (sub-systems), 5 dimensions (goals categories), 3 domains (material states), 3 scales (levels of organisation), 11 qualities (properties of resilience), and 6 capacities (phased responses). The framework was deployed to compare the UK and Uganda’s ESI resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the UK had a lower absorptivity losing a third of its demand, a longer degeneracy (8 months), and a slower recovery (12.5% of demand/month), its goals were hardly affected. In contrast, Uganda retrogressed in generation capacity (-2%), electricity access (-3.1%), and reliability (-1.7%). For projected events, the framework entailed characterising threats, assessing vulnerabilities, analysing system response, quantifying resilience, and evaluating adaptation. Two case studies were undertaken: the UK under windstorms and Uganda under arid conditions. The threats in the UK were modelled, using observation data from 173 met stations, as 100-year return wind gusts and mean speeds. The results show that the mean speeds event had no antagonising effect on the transmission network as opposed to gusts which caused 569 GWh/Week of unmet demand. Adaptation was only necessary for 60% of transmission corridors with responsiveness improving resilience by 70%, robustness by 55% and redundancy by 35%. The study implies that observed (as opposed to reanalysis) gusts could be better predictors of wind-related faults and that resilience enhancement should be prioritized within a few high-potency corridors. For Uganda, the projected worst-case arid scenario had hydropower production falling by 91% in 40 years. Limiting ecological flow to 150 m3/s could improve generation by 207% and if planned plants were to be developed 5 years earlier than set, the normalised production could increase by 23%. In contrast, increasing reservoir volumes for planned plants had no impact on production. Contrary to the researcher’s expectations, the study showed that reanalysis data generally predicted an increase in streamflow with increasing radiative forcing. Moreover, observed wind and streamflow measurements, showed no indication that climate change was driving extreme events.