Center for the Built Environment

To decarbonize the buildings and electricity sectors at a pace consistent with state and national climate goals, buildings must become grid resources, capable of morphing load profiles to accommodate variable renewable generation, facilitate cost-effective grid decarbonization, and help ensure reliable power system operation. Simultaneously, the changing climate poses increasing risks of extreme weather events and resulting power outages that developers, designers, and building operators must plan for. This yield s new questions around the best approaches to achieve these outcomes, what it costs, who benefits, and what barriers there are to widespread adoption.We seek to answer these questions by adopting a futuristic set of grid-interactive design requirements for a mid-rise affordable housing, mixed-use development: to sustain critical loads during an outage and to consume no grid electricity for residential end-uses between 4-9pm every day. We present an approach that achieves these requirements, working to decarbonize the grid and maximize resilience for the facility and its residents while also addressing shortfalls in housing supply. Our work includes detailed building energy and economic optimization combined with construction cost analysis and carbon impacts. We find that achieving the requirements comes at a ~5% cost premium, an amount not likely to be acceptable for affordable housing under current policies and industry standards. We then generalize our design into a replicable ‘recipe’ to optimize the integrated use of distributed energy resources and explore the challenges to widespread adoption. We suggest many barriers could be overcome with policy changes that would bring benefits to under-resourced populations and society as a whole.