Building resilience and looking past sustainability

November 20, 2015

Sustainable design is quickly becoming the new normal in terms of commercial construction. The rising cost of operations, utility and government incentives plus greater environmental concerns from consumers have influenced multiple industries to consider the business case for sustainability.

This trend is a positive both for the environment and for building owners interested in operating their facilities with lower operating costs. However, the push for a sustainable future is often impeded by a critical oversight: Today's sustainability standards may not be relevant several years down the road. Sarene Marshall, executive director of the Center for Sustainability with the Urban Land Institute, emphasized this point to FacilitiesNet:

"We need to all be thinking harder about what the future really looks like, as opposed to what the past looked like," she said. "There's a lot of talk in climate science circles about 'the new normal.' It's important for people to understand the new normal for the context that they are in."

Preparing for the new normal means going above and beyond sustainability efforts and refining the building process to prepare buildings for climate change and cost-effective, long-term operations.

Resilience translates to protection from the unexpected
Even owners who aren't persuaded to make their buildings sustainable should recognize the danger posed by shifts in our climate's behavior. According to BuildingGreen, multiple climate experts have predicted that precipitation levels are expected to continue fluctuating over the next few decades. As a result, facilities run the risk of being exposed to flooding or drought conditions that were not considered when the building was designed.

Severe weather puts additional strain on the nation's energy infrastructure. Increased air-conditioning use during heatwaves, for example, has had a hand in grid failures and electricity shortages over the past few decades. Likewise, increasing storm activity puts buildings near coasts at greater risk of being impacted by a natural disaster. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, over 600 power outages occurred due to weather events between 2003 and 2012. Facilities that lack resilience, the ability to deal with threats from weather changes, grid instability or impactful changes from how energy is used at the facility will eventually feel the full brunt of climate impacts on a more regular basis.

Vulnerability to unexpected changes will also make it extremely difficult for business owners to draft reliable operations budgets for the new year. Just look at what happened after Hurricane Sandy. The storm costs the economy over 27 billion. Seven out of the ten costliest storms in U.S. history occurred between 2004 and 2012. Unfortunately, many businesses were not prepared with resilience plans in place.

Anticipation and preparation are critical parts of resilient design
How can facilities become more resilient? First,  owners must  recognize the building's vulnerabilities. Then prioritize solutions with thoughtful preparation. First and foremost, companies must perform hazard assessments of their facilities and the surrounding areas to determine where unexpected changes are capable of crippling the business. Collect input from employees, management and customers. Find the biggest losses during the last outage. Was the greatest impact from lost output, wages, spoiled inventory or delayed production? Seeing where the gaps in resilience are will help in creating a plan that addresses your company's specific needs.

Some owners have turned to thermal energy storage, to supplement cogeneration or provide chiller plant resiliency. However, simply investing in emergency backup generators to handle the building's full load is not practical for many company budgets. Owners must prioritize what backup power will be used for. Cogeneration for making heat and power on-site can be used during a blackout as long as gas pipelines are working.

Some have turned to alternative solutions, such as energy storage, to serve this role and improve the building's resiliency. For example, Credit Suisse First Boston utilized CALMAC's IceBank thermal storage tanks to store electricity in the form of ice. In case of an emergency, this backup resource is capable of supplying the 2.25 million-square-foot commercial building's entire cooling load for over an hour. Thanks to the flexibility of thermal storage solutions like CALMAC's, solutions like these could be deployed to enhance the resilience of facilities and campuses of all sizes.

Other resiliency measures may include equipping the building with external electrical hookups to make powering the facility with a generator considerably easier when dealing with a blackout. Sidewalks that slope into tree pits can absorb excess rain and batteries can ensure that automatic equipment such as toilets keep operating. Sandbags are also an inexpensive way to prevent flooding. One strategic change like moving data center equipment from the basement to a higher floor, for example, is an effective means of preparing for a flood scenario. Technologies such as thermal energy storage tanks, made of non-corrodible and non-electronic materials, may instead be put in basements.