In this report, a resiliency analysis is carried out to assess the energy, economic, and power outage survivability benefits of efficient and Net-Zero communities. The analysis addresses the appropriate steps to designing an energy-efficient and Net-Zero community using Phoenix, Arizona as a primary location for weather and utility inputs. A baseline home is established using International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) 2018 code requirements. Three occupancy levels are evaluated in BEopt to provide diversity in the community’s building stock. The loads from the baseline, energy-efficient optimum, and Net-Zero optimum single-family homes are utilized to determine energy use profiles for various residential community types using occupancy statistics for Phoenix. Then, REopt is used to determine the photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage system sizes necessary for the community to survive a 72-hour power outage. The baseline community requires a 544-kW PV system and 375-kW/1,564 kWh battery storage system to keep all electrical loads online during a 72-hour power outage. The energy-efficient community requires a 291-kW PV system and a 202-kW/820 kWh battery storage system while the Net-Zero community requires a 291-kW PV system and a 191-kW/880 kWh battery storage system. In this study, the economic analysis indicates that it is 43% more cost-effective to install a shared PV plus storage system than to install individual PV plus storage systems in an energy-efficient community. After analyzing the system sizes and costs required to survive various outage durations, it is found that only a 4% difference in net present cost exists between a system sized for a 24-hour outage and a 144-hour outage. In the event of a pandemic or an event that causes a community-wide lockdown, the energy-efficient community would only survive 6 hours out of a 72-hour power outage during a time where plug loads are increased by 50% due to added laptops, monitors, and other office electronics. Finally, a climate sensitivity analysis is conducted for efficient communities in Naperville, Illinois and Augusta, Maine. The analysis suggests that for a 72-hour power outage starting on the peak demand day and time of the year, the cost of resiliency is higher in climates with more heating and cooling needs as HVAC is consistently the largest load in a residential building.

In this paper, the results of a feasibility analysis are summarized to assess the energy, economic, and environmental benefits of electrification and renewable energy integration for an urban district of Old City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. First, the energy demand for the district is reduced through the implementation of cost-effective energy efficiency measures (EEMs) appropriate for Philadelphia’s climate. Then, a combination of distributed generation (DG) systems including wind, photovoltaics, and hydropower are evaluated to determine optimized hybrid systems that meet the energy demand of non-electrified and electrified district. The analysis indicates that the implementation of common and proven EEMs to all the district buildings can reduce its annual energy consumption and CO2 emissions by 13% and 13.8%, respectively. Through cost optimization, a hybrid DG system combining wind and hydropower connected to the grid is found to lower the cost of energy for the non-electrified district to 0.007/kWh, with the added benefit to lower carbon emissions by 10%. Moreover, the analysis considered the case of electrified district which reduces life cycle costs by3.5%. By implementing electrification and EEMs, the electricity usage decreases by 14% and peak demand by 19.5% as well as CO2 emissions by 18%. Through cost optimization to design a hybrid DG system that can meet energy demands of the electrified district, wind and hydropower connected to the grid is found to achieve a cost of energy of0.008/kWh and carbon emissions reduction of 34.9%.

In this paper, a resiliency analysis is conducted to assess the energy, economic, and outage survivability benefits of efficient and Net-Zero Energy (NZE) communities. The analysis addresses the design of an energy-efficient and NZE community using Phoenix, Arizona as the primary location. The loads from the baseline, energy-efficient , and NZE single-family homes modeled in BEopt are used to determine load profiles for various residential community types. The photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage system sizes necessary for the community to survive a 72-hour power outage are determined using REopt. The economic analysis indicates that it is 43% more cost-effective to install a shared PV plus storage system than to install individual PV plus storage systems in an energy-efficient community. It is found that only a 4% difference in net present cost exists between a PV plus storage system sized for a 24-hour outage and a 144-hour outage. In the event of a community-wide lockdown, the survivability of the energy-efficient community is only 6 hours during a time where plug loads are increased by 50% due to added office electronics. A climate sensitivity analysis is conducted for efficient communities in Naperville, Illinois and Augusta, Maine. The analysis suggests that for a 72-hour power outage starting on the peak demand day and time of the year, the cost of resiliency is higher in climates with more heating and cooling needs as HVAC is consistently the largest load in a residential building.

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