Developing and Evaluating a Metric for Office Building Energy Resilience During a Power Outage

There is growing interest in resilience among building owners, service providers, andpolicymakers. However,there is a lack of consensus on how resilience is measured, particularly energy resilience. This paper describes an effort to develop and test a metric for energy resilience. First, it presents a review of current trends and practices in resilience planning, focusingon which standards and metrics are currently being used across various sectors to assess energy resilience for buildings, and where inconsistencies and gaps exist. This study builds upon the literature by narrowing the scope and boundaries of resilience to focus specifically on thermal comfort resilience within an office building, and uses parametric building energy modeling to evaluate the feasibility of “occupancy hours lost” (OHL) as a resilience metric to measure human productivity lost during a power disruption. Using this data, a multiple regression model was developed to show which building improvements would have the most significant effect on decreasing OHL during a disruption, and thus allow resilience to be calculated for a building based on the specifications of these parameters. This study determined that OHL may be used as a key resilience metric for assessing how prepared an office building will be when faced with the possibility of a power outage, and further addresses the key assumptions that must be considered for a resilience metric to be calculated.