Energy system resilience as an all-hazards system-of-systems property under climate and security challenges

Climate change is intensifying heat extremes, storms, floods, and wildfires, while cyber intrusions, geopolitical tensions, and supply-chain disruptions are introducing strategic shocks that can rival weather-related risks in the net-zero transition. This Review reframes energy system resilience as an all-hazards, system-of-systems property of the broader socio-technical energy architecture, spanning generation, networks, fuels, storage, and digital control. The analysis shows that resilience is distinct from reliability in both objective and temporal logic: it is event-centric, consequence-sensitive, and defined by degradation and recovery trajectories rather than by average interruption indices. By bringing together engineering, ecological, and adaptive perspectives, the Review advances a resilience-by-design framing that combines robustness and rapid restoration with graceful degradation, learning, and reconfiguration under nonstationary risk. Interdependencies across electricity, gas, water, telecommunications, transportation, and critical supply chains can convert localized failures into systemic disruptions and prolong recovery through component scarcity and logistical bottlenecks. Resilience is therefore better understood as a portfolio problem involving physical hardening, operational flexibility, distributed and islandable resources, restoration logistics, cyber safeguards, and governance and finance mechanisms, with explicit attention to tail-risk reduction and equity. The synthesis highlights priorities for resilient decarbonization, including multi-hazard stress testing, coupled multi-infrastructure modeling, improved analytics for high-distributed-energy-resource systems, stronger cyber resilience, and closer attention to materials and supply-chain vulnerabilities.