Full Title: Modeling and Design of Solar + Storage-Powered Community Resilience Hubs Across California
Author(s): Patrick M. Murphy, Yunus Kinkhabwala, Bethany Kwoka, Yanelli Nunez, Annelise Dillon, Audrey Amezcua-Smith, and Elena Krieger
Publisher(s): Risk Analysis
Publication Date: June 26, 2024
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Description (excerpt):
Distributed clean, reliable energy resources like solar plus battery storage (solar + storage) can reduce harmful emissions while supporting resilience. Solar + storage-powered resilience hubs provide energy for critical services during disasters while increasing human adaptive capacity year round. The authors studied where utility rates, local climate, and historical injustice make solar + storage resilience hubs more valuable and more challenging.
The authors modeled the economic and climate impacts of outfitting candidate hub sites across California with solar + storage for everyday operations and identified designs and costs required to withstand a range of outages considering weather impacts on energy needs and availability. The authors integrated sociodemographic data to prioritize the siting of resilience hubs, to focus potential policy and funding priorities on regions where solar + storage for resilience hubs is hard or expensive, and where populations are most in need.
The authors identified almost 20,000 candidate buildings with more than 8 GW of total rooftop solar potential capable of reducing CO2 emissions by 5 million tons per year while providing energy for community resilience. Hub capacity for one of the most challenging missions—providing emergency shelter during a power outage and smoke event—could have a statewide average lifetime cost of less than $2000 per seat. The authors identified regional challenges including insufficient rooftop solar capacity in cities, low sunlight in northern coastal California, and high costs driven by utility rate structures in Sacramento and the Imperial Valley. Results show that rates and net metering rules that incentivize solar + storage during everyday operations decrease resilience costs.