Frédéric Babonneau, Amit Kanudia, Maryse Labriet, Richard Loulou, Jean-Philippe Vial. Energy Security: A Robust Optimization Approach to Design a Robust European Energy Supply via TIAM WORLD. Environmental Modeling and Assessment (2012) 17:19–37.

The analysis is performed using the TIAM-WORLD integrated model, modified to implement the robust optimization approach. TIAM is a global energy environment model based on the calculation of a partial equilibrium in the energy and emissions markets. It explicitly describes a very large number of technologies and energy forms for energy supply, transformation, trade and end-use. Various incarnations of the TIAM model have been used to analyze global energy and climate issues.

risks related to energy supply can be geological (possible depletion of resources), economic (price fluctuations), technical (system failures for different reasons), environmental (accidents or politics) or geopolitical. Furthermore, risk management will be different if the risks are external or internal to Europe. Risks internal to Europe generally involve dealing with low probability events, as well as appropriate investments in energy supply, storage, transmission, and distribution. Finally, the time scale of the different risks varies from short term (e.g., supply shortages due to technical failures) to long term (resource depletion, pricing, political decisions, etc.) and the appropriate actions will differ according to the time scale and nature of the risks.

Robust optimization, a new methodology that is becoming more and more popular, is an alternative way to deal with uncertainty. It has the advantage of being simple to implement, avoiding computational difficulties and requiring minimal information about the true probability distributions. It is used in this analysis to assess the impact on the EU energy supply of protection against transport system disturbances. This methodology makes it possible to specify the desired diversification of supply and reduction of the EU's dependence on imports to meet a prescribed level of security in a cost-effective manner.