Grid Assets: Refining Architecture’s Role in the Energy Puzzle
It’s that time of year in North America: The dead of winter and a brutal cold snap plunges the temperature below freezing. Across the country, people huddle inside and, if they’re lucky, they can afford to crank up the thermostat to stay warm. The electricity grid—the energy backbone we rely on to power the building systems that keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer—strains under the simultaneous energy needs of each building. Bundled up inside, you pull up the latest news and see a headline or two about how tools like AI are further stretching the grid’s ability to supply all the energy that’s needed. Or you might be looking at your latest power bill, which has jumped up along with your thermostat set point. You’re physically warm, but something about the larger scenario leaves you less than comfortable. But, what if the building you’re sitting in and the systems you rely on to stay comfortable address the grid stress you’re hearing more about? What if they are also a key component to long-term energy resilience, affordability, security and reliability?
“What if the building you’re sitting in and the systems you rely on to stay comfortable address the grid stress you’re hearing more about?”
With technology that is ready to deploy at scale today, the building you’re sitting in may be.
Buildings, like the one you’re sitting in reading this article, are now working in collaboration with the grid, adapting their energy use to reduce coincident peak demand and enabling us to leverage the existing grid more effectively. These technologies, in turn, allow for more integrated grid investment planning and can make electricity more affordable and reliable. For architects, engineers, developers and building owners, building-grid collaboration represents a huge opportunity. Rethinking how we design and operate new and existing buildings is an entirely new value stream for building owners.
Buildings as Part of the Energy Equation
Electricity use in many of the places we rely on everyday like hospitals, schools and, increasingly, data centers, is growing. Our energy grid wasn’t built to handle the electrical demand that is projected in the near future. Many regions experience transmission congestion and constraints—meaning the power doesn’t easily or affordably get to where it is needed—due to the limits of existing infrastructure. In addition, much of the U.S. power grid’s components are operating well beyond their intended lifespans, increasing costs, risks and decreasing system efficiency.
We need to modernize the grid, yes, but the traditional solution to the challenges we face—building new power plants or wires—are expensive, take a long time to implement and can perpetuate existing inefficiencies. If we deploy design thinking, we could unlock a resource that addresses the challenges we face with the current system, enable new generation to be added to the grid, and help people get affordable power when and where they need it.
For more than 150 years, the grid and the built environment have largely operated as independent systems. Buildings consume energy, so we design for the highest possible need (a.k.a. peak demand). In this traditional framework, questions about how to meet increased energy demand were really questions about production: How do we make more energy? However, with the tools and technologies we have today, the answer to accommodating growing demand, whether it is from data centers, increased electrification or more extreme weather driving up heating or air conditioning use, can be much more interesting.
As designers, we see buildings as physical, cultural and social assets. This remains true. However, we also now have the tools and technology to reimagine them as energy assets: dynamic participants in a more dynamic, interconnected and transactive energy system. With advancements in battery storage, distributed energy resources and grid-interactive technology that allows for more dynamic building-grid communication, architects are uniquely positioned to help avert grid strain by integrating buildings more deeply into energy systems.
Buildings as Grid Flexibility Solutions
Think about the grid as a five-lane highway. During rush hour, when lots of people are trying to get to or from home and work—all at the same time—the highway is jammed. At 2 AM, when most of us are in bed, there’s plenty of room and traffic flows freely. This is an unfortunate reality for some infrastructure: strained to the point of failure for parts of the day, woefully underutilized for other parts of the day. In this analogy, building energy use is the commuter and the grid is the highway. While it isn’t practical (for most of us) to shift our commute time to 2 AM when the highway is free of congestion, technology deployed in buildings can effectively take advantage of all the time the grid is underutilized, without any perceptible difference in the services your building provides you. Buildings become power players in consuming and storing energy during non-peak times and reducing consumption during peak. They have potential to function as shock absorbers, buffers, and suppliers to the electric grid, smoothing out peaks and valleys in demand and supply. When we do this, we create the ability to utilize the grid we’ve already bought and paid for more effectively.
What does this look like? Think about a sports stadium or a school, which have specific days or months where attendance is significantly higher than other times. On sports game days or school days, respectively, the lights are on, the technology is humming, HVAC systems are keeping people comfortable and energy use (and the grid demand associated with it) is relatively high. We design for this peak, optimizing it as much as possible with passive design and efficiency strategies. But what about off days? With design thinking, we can explore how to deploy active energy systems to use excess capacity in days when the facilities don’t need to feed their max demand
The same logic can apply to data centers. Often maligned as “energy hogs,” data centers can partner with their surrounding communities in to create an integrated and adaptive energy ecosystem by incorporating energy storage, on-site energy generation and demand-response (optimizing energy use based on grid congestion). By designing buildings to be integrated energy assets, instead of just load centers, they can respond to grid signals (price changes, peak demand and congestion response) and flex their collective energy use in response to future growth and moments of intense demand.
Buildings of all shapes and uses can benefit from this kind of thinking. Winter heating spikes in New England and scorching summer heat in the Southwest both often trigger concern about grid stability, and this will likely intensify in the future. But if we armed buildings old and new with better insulation, electrified systems, batteries and automation systems that proactively manage operations, we can flex energy use and drastically reduce the load on energy grids.
Flexible energy solutions at the building, block and district scale further expand the potential of adaptive, grid-interactive architectural strategies. What if we more frequently paired shared battery facilities with district energy systems? Imagine a battery system that is capable of absorbing wind energy at night in Texas, storing it, and deploying it to the larger community during periods of high daytime demand. This is a tactic we are currently exploring with a project in Dallas, where the building can help reduce congestion in the distribution system, potentially obviate the need for substation upgrades and preserve capital for other improvements needed on the local grid.
Similar benefits can be realized by deploying managed electric vehicle charging solutions. CapEx investments that have been conventional wisdom to date when installing a charger for an electric vehicle, for example, can potentially be avoided by having a load controller deconflict when certain energy consuming activities occur. In a residential setting, by sequencing when you dry your clothes and charge your EV, you may be able to avoid the investment in a heavy up of your electrical panel.
The Role of Architects in the Energy Future
Architects and allied disciplines play a key role in creating and deploying solutions that our energy security, resilience and affordability depend on. Design teams can bring grid-friendly ideas to the table at the outset because they are smart business decisions and a competitive advantage.
The good news is that we don’t need futuristic technology to start. The tools and systems for smarter, grid-interactive efficient buildings are already here. What we need is creativity, collaboration and leadership to deploy these solutions at scale.
When you read headlines about whether the grid is prepared for the future, know that those headlines are a call to action. To design smarter. To think bigger. To open new discussions with municipalities and utilities about how our sectors intersect. And to create buildings that power the future for the grid, our cities, and the people who live in them.
