The conceptual design phase is the first step in the design process of an engineering system. Most engineering systems, including cogeneration plants, may and likely will experience some malfunctions during its life cycle. The metrics typically considered in the conceptual design phase (and for analysis and optimization) of energy systems are cost, efficiency and environmental impacts. Quite rarely are operational considerations about malfunctions integrated during the conceptual design phase. Resilient design, or design for resilience, addresses this gap as illustrated here in the area of energy conversion and conservation of energy processes by examining the conceptual design of a cogeneration plant. Resilient design is a relatively new research field where the engineering system is designed such that it can optimally recover from failures. The main challenge is to quantify the resilience in early design phases, since there is not much detailed information about system components available at this point. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel resilient design framework that uses new metrics within a Monte Carlo-based assessment approach. The framework is exercised on conceptual designs of cogeneration plants. Results from this framework are compared against those from a methodology based on complex networks theory that has been previously suggested in the literature. The former presented more consistent results than the latter and we discuss the differences. Results also show that the concept with higher efficiency was not the one with higher resilience. Finally, we discuss how to integrate specific failure probabilities information into the framework (should that information be available), and deliberate on relations between resilience, fault handling strategies and design requirements.