Guidelines to a More Resilient Commercial Building
September 28, 2017
Recent weather events have called attention to how fragile our electricity infrastructure is. Power losses have impacted people and their homes and businesses with long lasting consequences for economies around the globe. How prepared are you for the next event? How resilient will your building be during equipment downtime or the next hurricane, thunderstorm, blackout and brownout?
More Resilient Building
Systems of redundancy and resilient buildings are critical for businesses and communities planning to sustain uninterrupted power. With redundant building systems, extra components such as generators, energy storage and renewable resources are essential. These extras are not strictly needed for everyday business functioning yet they exist in case of failure from other internal or external system components and can become a beneficial part of daily operations. Resiliency, which is similar to redundancy, has more to do with a business’ capacity to maintain or continue to remain operational during power supply or equipment reliability issues. In short, a more resilient building is aided by redundancy.
Unfortunately, most modern building are not designed with resiliency in mind. When you think of buildings built in the 19th and early 20th century, they were massive. They contained mass. Mass acted like a giant capacitor, keeping a building warmer in the winter then cooler in the summer. Architects used to design more resilient buildings. Ice storage brings that missing mass back. Passive design techniques such as operable windows that utilize cross and stack ventilation during warm days, shutters and awnings to block summer south-side sun can also help commercial buildings, schools, hospitals, retail stores and government buildings maintain livable, workable temperatures while limiting energy usage and demand.
Resiliency Planning
Today redundant equipment and strategies are most often an add-on, seen by the extra upfront cost for back-up power. However, due to weather events like hurricanes or thunderstorms, strain on the grid from air-conditioning on hot summer days, and growth of intermittent renewable energy resources, a growing number of businesses are turning to Resiliency Planning.
Losing power can cost businesses thousands of dollars per hour. Planning can help counteract these losses. While in the most extreme circumstances rebuilding may be necessary, more often than not, there are more frequent shorter-term outages that impact net operating expenses. To attenuate and prioritize activities, building owners should first narrow down the reason for the resiliency plan.
Resiliency Levels
Resiliency Plans are typically enacted as a way of managing either routine outages, maintenance, long term outages, or microgrid support. Consider the following levels.
- Routine outages can occur because of a local thunder storm, circuit breaker failure, wire break, chiller failure (multiple chiller facilities) or transformer outage. When these outages occur ice storage can provide stored cooling to the building. The building remains operational with a small battery or generator to power pumps, fans and emergency lighting. Occupants remain productive while operators are provided time to gather information about the outage and plan to get back to normal operation.
- If maintenance is a concern, ice storage allows managers can schedule chiller maintenance during the day to reduce overtime costs while ensuring the work gets done properly in a cost effective manner. During cooling season shoulder months, the stored cooling can cool the building entirely providing chiller off time for maintenance.
- For long term outages partial ice storage systems use a right sized or smaller than peak capacity chiller. Smaller on site generators can be installed to power the chiller, ancillary equipment and lighting during the day and charge the tanks at night.
- If a business is relying heaving on on-site solar or wind turbines microgrid support will be needed. Renewable energy is becoming a larger portion of the generation mix, but it is intermittent and weather dependent. Utilization of renewable generation assets is very low as a consequence. If today’s grid is to be reliable, the fossil fuels, which is stored energy, that is being removed from the grid must be replaced with grid energy storage. The new grid has to be able to store excess renewable generation when it is available and use this stored excess energy when renewable output is low. Ice Storage can provide a quick means to store cooling energy or discharge cooling energy as the grid requires
Research and next steps
Now that you have a better idea of what specific problem you’re looking to solve, here are some things to keep in mind and basic questions to consider getting started on a Resiliency Plan.
First calculate the severity of any past and/or local outages. Does your building or community become unsafe in an outage? How often do these power outages occur? Can you maintain comfortable conditions for employees or customers for extended periods of time? In the case of a blackout, thunderstorm or hurricane would you wait hours, days or weeks? What losses are incurred as a result? How quickly can your business processes recover from a power outage? What is the impact of that loss on other processes or ability to gather resources? What can you do to minimize the time and cost to repair the problem while keeping the space comfortable? What is your back-up plan to maintain workflow? Quantify these losses in terms of lost productivity and revenue.
Then, consider the solutions available to your business. Include doing nothing at all. Some considerations should include passive design strategies, demand side strategies such as hot and cool thermal storage and on-site power including generators, co-generation and renewables. Solar panels and batteries are coming come down in price and solar lights are another good option.
Analysis and final tips
Once your research is complete you’ll want to prepare a Risk Reward Analysis. Compare the cost of what you’ll lose vs what you’ll gain by implementing the researched solutions.
Keep in mind that despite best intentions, a panacea doesn’t exist. During outages, many things can go wrong. For instance, you may not have access to fuel for generators. Solar panels may get blown away. Employees may have limited transportation options. Extended outages lasting weeks may extinguish resources. As such you may need multiple redundant solutions or to partner with various local and government organizations on emergency management.
Another consideration is that while batteries plus solar are great for lighting and computers, in terms of economics, efficiency and sustainability, it makes no sense to charge a battery only to convert its energy again to btus. Plus, it’s less expensive to store a btu then the electron needed to create it. So cool and heat storage, co-generation and geothermal systems should be considered to supply thermal comfort.
Consider installing cool energy storage in the buildings when it has the best return of investment. New construction with energy storage is very affordable and, in many 
cases, costs no more than conventional chilled water cooling systems. Any time additional space is added to a facility or additional cooling capacity is required it is a great time to invest in energy storage too. Installing energy storage can improve resiliency while reducing operating costs as well. Another great time to look at storage when the ROI is better is during chiller replacements.
By following these guidelines, you’ll have a unique path forward tailored to your specific business needs, whether the solution includes batteries, solar panels, back-up generators, ice storage or some other fix.
