How Distributed Energy Resources Can Improve Resilience in Public Buildings: Three Case Studies and a Step By-Step Guide

States, local governments, and other public organizations face a range of priorities when it comes to powering their buildings. These priorities can include saving money, ensuring resilience, and increasingly, meeting energy efficiency and renewable energy goals or targets. Targeted, cost-effective investments in energy efficiency have demonstrated success in supporting each of these priorities. Efficiency improvements can also provide added benefits when combined with another emerging strategy for critical public facilities: onsite generation, and storage when needed, as part of a microgrid system with the ability to “island” from the grid and power critical operations during a grid outage. Publicly available tools from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s National Laboratories can help energy managers and other decision-makers explore options to meet their unique energy needs while saving energy and money.