VC-21-003 -- Energy Master Planning for Resilient Public Communities--Best Practices from North American Universities

Until recently, most planners of public communities (militarygarrisons, universities, and so on) addressed energysystems for new facilities on an individual facility basis withoutconsideration of community-wide goals relevant to energysources, renewables, storage, or future energy generationneeds. Because building retrofits of public buildings typicallydo not address energy needs beyond the minimum coderequirements, it can be difficult if not impossible to achievecommunity-level targets on a building-by-building basis.Planning on the basis of cost and general reliability may alsofail to deliver community-level resilience. For example, manybuilding code requirements focus on hardening to specificthreats, but in a multibuilding community only a few of thesebuildings may be mission critical. Over the past two decades,the frequency and duration of regional power outages fromweather, man-made events, and aging infrastructure haveincreased. Major disruptions of electric and thermal energyhave degraded critical mission capabilities and caused significanteconomic impacts. This paper describes how communitylevel quantitative and qualitative resilience analysis andmetrics have been incorporated into community planning bestpractices. It is based on research performed under the InternationalEnergy Agency’s “Energy in Buildings and CommunitiesProgram Annex 73,” focusing on the development ofguidelines and tools that support the planning of net zeroenergy resilient public communities as well as researchperformed under Environmental Security Technology CertificationProgram (ESTCP) project EW18-D1-5281, “TechnologiesIntegration to Achieve Resilient, Low-Energy MilitaryInstallations.”