Page 23 - NBIZ October 2021

of the investment models do not demand systems and identify those Steps one and two are items that
consider the likelihood and intensity systems that are considered a critical building managers routinely work on;
of extreme weather and/or its impact load versus those that can be turned the key differences in this framework
on business continuity. off or ramped down. Figure 4 on the are steps three and four. Both steps
following page, indicates an example require building managers to assess
Power Resilience Planning of the change in power demand at an current and future weather risk and
Framework industrial facility based on various the potential likelihood of disruptions
HARC (harcresearch.org) has operational scenarios. due to these risks. It is important to
developed the resilience planning
framework, seen in figure 3, to better
assess and design tailored micro-
grids that meet cost-efficiency and
resilience requirements. The goal for
this framework is for an organiza-
tion to develop a plan to understand
their outage risks and support the
design process of a resilient microg-
rid to mitigate those risks.
This framework incorporates the
load lost due to the power outages,
the risk of power outages due to
climate change, and the cost of
deploying a microgrid resilient to
power outages.
The framework walks a facility
manager through eight steps to
determine the opportunity to deploy
a resilient power grid. The first step,
critical to any decision around on-
site generation, is to make energy
efficiency improvements. Energy
efficiency measures will lessen
the overall power demand at a site
resulting in less power to be provid-
ed by the utility or the microgrid.
The result is lower overall operating
costs. HARC has developed a com-
mercial energy efficiency assessment
tool (https://energyfinancing.har-
cresearch.org/) located on the Texas
Energy Hub (https://energyhub.
harcresearch.org/) to help building
owners determine their best options
for energy efficiency.
Once through the energy
efficiency measures, the facility
manager will go through a four-step
process to determine the risk of
an outage and the costs associated
with these risks. The key to this is
determining the power demand of
the site, considering not just min-
imum or maximum power demand
but also assessing the most frequent
power demand scenarios. Another
crucial point is to identify the
energy sub-systems or key energy

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