Smart building design can play a central role in California’s drive to decarbonize its electricity system, but the massive stock of existing structures cannot be left out of the effort.

That was a key takeaway from a panel discussion Wednesday, part of the California Energy Commission’s two-day forum on “Reimagining Buildings for a Carbon Neutral Future.”

Andrew McAllister, CEC | California Energy Commission

“Decarbonizing our built environment is an opportunity to improve the relationship that our buildings have to the grid,” said Commissioner Andrew McAllister, the panel moderator.

But McAllister said he needed to “dispatch” one timely topic before kicking off the panel: “Our decarbonization goals were not the underlying reasons for” the rolling blackouts that shut power to millions of Californians during a mid-August heat wave. (See CAISO Provides More Details on Blackouts.)

Instead, the supply shortages prompting the Aug. 14-15 blackouts were caused by “momentary issues regarding weather” and California’s inability to import power from other Western states suffering under the same record-setting heat, McAllister said. (See Theories Abound over California Blackouts Cause.)

“It was really the reserve capacity that was not available when it was expected to be there,” he said. “The system actually mobilized new resources” during the system emergency.

McAllister’s defense of California’s ambitious environmental goals provided a transition into the theme of the panel: “Our buildings can be a decarbonization resource for the grid,” he said.

Buildings can be modified to “help in an aggregated way” to support grid reliability through load flexibility, demand response and use of distributed energy resources, McAllister said. He cited the example of OhmConnect, a DR provider that works with residential customers of Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison that helped stave off additional blackouts over Aug. 17-18 by calling on 250 MW of aggregated energy reductions.

“They have relationships with individual residential customers, and it’s a bidirectional, callable, fairly predictable resource at this point,” he said.

“How our buildings actually consume energy and how they behave is a topic of our time, and we will be in the coming months and years getting deep into that and developing resources to help that happen at scale,” McAllister said.

New and Old

New construction tends to dominate discussions around green building. McAllister asked his panelists to consider how existing buildings will represent the majority of structures needing decarbonization by midcentury, which in California will mean the electrification of appliances that still largely run on natural gas, such as furnaces, water heaters and stoves.

“Not that fully decarbonizing new construction is easy, but I think that it’s a different challenge and probably has fewer facets to it than our existing buildings,” he said.

McAllister pointed to one of those facets: that California’s most diverse populations live in existing housing stock, inserting a social and racial equity angle into the policy of decarbonizing housing.

Heather Rosenberg, Arup | California Energy Commission

“Certainly, anything that’s new should be held to the highest standard,” said Heather Rosenberg, an associate principal at sustainability consultant Arup. “That said, the places where there is most significant need is in existing buildings … particularly buildings in low-income communities and affordable housing.”

Rosenberg pointed to the difficulty of addressing decarbonizing homes in areas with low-income housing that have long suffered from “chronic” disinvestment.

“As we think about that and as we think about our communities, there is an opportunity to bring investment in and make sure that it’s done for the people who are in those communities without triggering further displacement and further degradation in places that really are requiring investment,” Rosenberg said.

“Some of our biggest projects that have pursued certification and used our platforms are renovation projects,” said Shawn Hesse, director of business development at the International Living Future Institute, which certifies structures that meet green standards.

“The question we pose all the time is [that] we’re not interested in something that’s a little less bad; we want to know what’s good,” Hesse said. “What does good look like? And you can ask that question for renovation projects as well.”

“I think we’re uniquely positioned here in California to have greater influence and impact on decarbonization, whether it’s existing or new buildings,” said Miranda Gardiner, senior vice president with design firm HKS. “We have Silicon Valley; we have so many higher [education] institutions — the [University of California] campuses that marry their new and existing construction with their master plans.”

Miranda Gardiner, HKS | California Energy Commission

Gardiner said she appreciates working with clients such as universities and health care providers because “they’re not into this kind of fast-fashion approach that some of our developer clients are, and they know their buildings are going to be operational/functional [and] they’re going to have occupants in them for the next 50 years, and they’re thinking about it long-term.”

“And when they look at their existing stock, [they ask the question], ‘How do I bring that up to speed with the new buildings?’” she said.

McAllister asked the panel how the building industry can attract financing for decarbonized buildings and appeal to investors that recognize the value of “co-benefits” from greater building efficiencies. Those benefits can include lower expenses, better indoor air quality and the livability improvements from an overall higher standard of design.

Rosenberg said Arup is currently working with a major nonprofit developer of affordable housing to create metrics for co-benefits in a way that could drive investment from socially conscious investors.

“And then you have to think about how to bundle projects, because at the individual project level, it’s not enough to attract investment. You need a bunch of them, and then what’s the [return on investment]?” she said.

“We aren’t missing the technology. We aren’t missing the recognition of the climate imperative,” Hesse said. “What we’re missing is the ability to align the financing with these projects to actually turn them into reality.”

Rosenberg said the economic signals for decarbonization will not be strong enough until there’s a “real” price on carbon, which will likely require a “regulatory push.”

None of the panelists could answer McAllister’s question about what carbon price would actually “flip the switch” and bring investment into building decarbonization.

“We really need to … unpack that,” McAllister said.

Decentralized Resilience

Decarbonization is currently seen as “mitigation strategy” for climate change, but it can move beyond that role to reshape the relationship between the built environment and the electricity grid, Rosenberg said.

“It also can become, if we design it right, an adaptation strategy where we are reducing our dependence on a completely centralized and fairly rigid grid and bringing diversity, flexibility, durability [and] redundancy into our energy system in some new and creative ways. But it only works if you design it that way,” Rosenberg said.

The California utility policy of public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) to avoid sparking wildfires “has changed the way that people think about power reliability,” she said. PSPS is driving interest in microgrids by businesses such as airports, hospitals and data centers, for whom the momentary switching to backup power is too disruptive.

While those organizations previously couldn’t justify the cost of a microgrid based on the benefits of having flexible load or providing DR, the value of having “constant power” now makes the idea “pencil” out — “and that’s been a really big shift in the state,” Rosenberg said.

Shawn Hesse, International Living Future Institute | California Energy Commission

Hesse echoed the theme of reducing dependence on a centralized grid, offering a different take on the notion of resilience.

“As great as new technology is, and the ability to do instantaneous demand shifting, there are some pretty basic things that allow us to design projects to need less energy in the first place,” Hesse said.

He recounted a story about a project team from his company meeting in a “living” — or sustainably designed — building when the grid went down.

“No one noticed,” he said, because the building was designed based on passive energy principles, being primarily lit by daylight and having a natural ventilation system.

“When it does need those active systems, those systems are powered through on-site renewables,” Hesse said.

“Designing out the reliance on those kinds of systems is kind of the primary resilience strategy that allows us to do so many things all at once,” he continued. “I don’t want to leave that out of the conversation — that there’s actually a huge role to play in terms of the design community, particularly, in really doing our own best practice and not relying so much on grid administrators.”