Assessing the Energy Resilience of Office Buildings: Development and Testing of a Simplified Metric for Real Estate Stakeholders

Increasing concern over higher frequency extreme weather events is driving a push towards more resilient built environment. In recent years there has been growing interest in understanding how to evaluate, measure, and improve building energy resilience, i.e., the ability of provide energy-related services event local or regional power outage. addition human health safety, many stakeholders are keenly interested allow continuity operations minimize business disruption. Office buildings subject significant economic losses when disrupted due We propose “occupant hours lost” (OHL) as means measure productivity lost result outage office buildings. OHL determined based on indoor conditions each space for hour during outage, then aggregated spatially temporally determine whole OHL. used quasi-Monte Carlo parametric simulations demonstrate metric varies different characteristics across climate zones seasons. The simulation dataset was develop simple regression models assessing impact ten key most impactful were window-to-wall ratio window characteristics. show promise assess screen resilience using basic characteristics, especially non-critical facilities where it may not be viable conduct detailed engineering analysis.