The primary objectives of this project are to A) quantitatively assess the changing impacts of climate change on installation asset reliability and resilience – buildings, loads, generation, storage, electrical network, and B) simulate how shifts from conventional planning and operations toward coordinated and integrated energy systems (including decentralized and distributed technologies) can create new opportunities for improving resilience during gradual (e.g., rising air temperatures) and extreme climate events (e.g., firestorm, heat wave, cold snap). The approach will entail the following:

I. Simulate current and future demand profiles including the implementation of novel building energy technologies (including envelope and equipment efficiencies).

II. Assess future climate conditions for southwest installations and quantify impact on electrical assets – loads, generation, storage, electrical network, interconnection – to determine vulnerabilities due to enhanced degradation and equipment failure.

III. Create a vulnerability assessment that considers building energy technologies, distribution, climate hazards, and building criticality.

IV. Assess novel building technologies and electrical system innovations to reduce vulnerabilities to climate change and prioritize action plans and demonstration projects that enhance adaptation to climate hazards.

As the realities of aging infrastructure come head-to-head with climate hazards, the capabilities to assess vulnerabilities and proactively respond have become necessary. Energy systems appear particularly vulnerable, as aging buildings must function in gradual and extreme environments that are changing, and the grids they rely on are directly exposed to new hazards. Climate uncertainty necessitates new approaches that embrace dynamic planning. The project team plans to develop and integrate a suite of cutting-edge models to advance planning capabilities for Department of Defense (DoD) facilities around building energy systems in the face of climate change. This will involve creating building energy simulations that consider technology and climate change, synthetic power distribution models to estimate grid operations, and combined vulnerability assessments that describe how buildings are vulnerable to future climate shocks.

Significant opportunities exist to support DoD facilities toward pointed investments in critical infrastructure to protect against climate change. Aging infrastructure and the immense cost of rehabilitating infrastructure necessitates new approaches that can provide insights into precisely where and how investments should be prioritized. Toward this end, the modeling framework and assessment of novel technologies that integrate building and grid technology solutions represent a critical competency for DoD and base managers as they plan for future investment. After development, the combined model can be deployed to any DoD facility, provided that basic information on base operations and infrastructure can be produced. Most likely, DoD facilities that are projected to experience extreme impacts from climate change (at the intersection of aging infrastructure and climate hazards) will likely benefit the most. Furthermore, facilities that are aggressively pursuing climate adaptation strategies are likely to get the most benefit from the framework.