Conference Paper

Proceedings of SimBuild Conference 2024

Ko’olauloa Community Resilience Hub Design Trade-off Study

Andrea Alberto Mammoli ¹, Daniel Lorenz Villa ¹, John Eddy ¹, Illya Azaroff ², Dotty Kelly-Paddock ^3
1 Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America
² Plus Lab Architect, PLLC, Brooklyn, New York, United States of America
³ Hau'ula Community Association, Hau'ula Hawai'i, United States of America

Abstract: The planned Ko‘olauloa community resilience hub (KCRH) in Hau’ula Hawaii is intended to serve a dual function as a 3,660 m2 community center, and a resilient storm shelter powered by a microgrid. This study considers the interaction of building energy efficiency and microgrid cost and performance. A building energy model of the KCRH is used to determine critical and noncritical loads for a business-as-usual system and a high-efficiency system. A techno-economic optimization was conducted using the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources software considering two microgrid configurations, one with diesel backup, and the other with renewables-only, including photo-voltaic (PV) and storage battery. High energy efficiency reduces estimated microgrid cost by 34% for the diesel-PV and by 36% for all-renewables in comparison to business as usual. A resilience analysis conducted with the Microgrid Design Toolkit reveals that the high-efficiency system option enables much higher resilience for the renewables-only microgrid that meets cost limitations. The results, showing tradeoffs between resilience, efficiency and cost may be used by the Hau‘ula community to make informed decisions about the final design of the KCRH.
Keywords: Community Resilience Hub, Microgrids, Efficiency-Resilience trade-offs, building energy modeling, Hurricanes
Pages: 317 - 328
Paper: