Optimal Designs of Grid-Connected Energy Efficient and Resilient Residential Communities

Abstract

As demand continues to grow throughout the United States, new communities have unique opportunities to take advantage of load-side and generation-side integrations with the goal of reducing energy use, improving the environment, and increasing resilience. Most currently reported literature investigates energy efficiency and reduction of building energy consumption or on-site generation and net-zero energy goals without resiliency performance analysis. This study examines the impacts of residential building characteristics and energy sources, including electricity and natural gas, on the capacity of the on-site photovoltaic (PV) generation required to achieve net-zero energy and resiliency goals for a community in Longmont, CO. Six community load designs are shown to impact system sizes and costs for on-site generation and resilience. Gas and electrified minimum cost designs reduce source energy from their baselines by 17% and 47%, respectively. Gas minimum cost designs reduce initial and annualized energy costs by $487 and $247 per year, whereas electrified minimum cost designs increase initial costs by $4991 and reduce annualized energy costs by $1266 per year. Resilience designs show that with various outage durations, the longer the outage design case, the larger the system, but the greater the probability of surviving outages throughout the year, with gas communities representing lower probabilities of survivability than electrified communities.