Grid-interactive efficient buildings are a big deal with an equally big name.
GEBs, for short, were one of the focal areas in a slate of new building-focused programs announced by the Biden administration earlier this year. Those announcements coincided with the release of a US Department of Energy (DOE) report that sketched out the potential benefits of GEB technologies, which could save more than $100 billion in electric power system costs over the next 20 years. More recently, the DOE awarded $61 million to fund 10 GEB pilot projects across the country.
Meanwhile, electric utilities are taking notice of the ways that GEBs can reduce demands on the grid. Increasingly, utilities are shifting toward rate structures that benefit the grid as well as building owners who employ GEB technologies.
So what is this next big thing in building efficiency with the mouthful of a name? Building managers need not be scared off by the terminology. By and large, GEBs are just a jargony way of describing a package of more familiar measures that together provide energy, cost, and emissions savings. And although GEBs are in some ways the buildings of the future, we have found that building managers can implement many GEB measures today at little to no cost.
What Are GEBs?
Grid-interactive efficient buildings integrate three different energy management technologies and approaches: energy efficiency, distributed energy resources (such as solar panels and battery storage), and demand flexibility.
Whereas energy efficiency measures focus on how much energy a building consumes, demand flexibility refers to a building’s ability to manage when that energy is consumed. Today, demand flexibility mostly revolves around time-of-use pricing for electricity—shifting energy use toward the times when electricity is cheapest. Demand flexibility approaches can be low-tech, such as using a building’s thermal mass to heat or cool spaces at off-peak hours, or high-tech, such as drawing on battery storage to power building operations during peak hours.
The benefits of GEBs include energy cost savings, lower GHG emissions, and resilience to grid disruptions. The energy efficiency and on-site electricity generation of GEBs lead to lower energy consumption and costs, which also reduces overall demands on the electricity system. These measures, as well as the shifting of electricity use with demand flexibility, also help limit costly peaks in demand, which in turn reduces the likelihood of outages and means less need for dirty, fossil-burning “peaker” plants on the grid. Shifting electricity demand toward times of lower utilization or greater supply (for instance, hours when solar energy is abundant) also leads to more efficient use of grid resources, which benefits all customers on the grid.
GEBs Made Easy
Fully interactive GEBs that shift energy use in response to real-time pricing signals or the instantaneous carbon intensity of the grid are the future in most locations, but building managers can already start reaping many of the benefits outlined above. In our recent report Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings Made Easy, we identified simple, low-cost steps toward GEB readiness that produce immediate cost, energy, and carbon savings.
Our report was written for US General Services Administration (GSA) building managers, but the wide variety of buildings in the GSA portfolio makes the recommendations broadly applicable to a range of commercial properties. As the nation’s largest landlord, the GSA manages almost 10,000 buildings, including offices, courthouses, post offices, and other commercial buildings.
“GSA is a notable leader in climate action and a champion of high-performance buildings,” says RMI’s Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus Amory Lovins. “Grid-interactive efficient buildings play a critical role in supporting GSA’s climate leadership by enabling dynamic load shifting. This cuts operating costs and boosts renewable energy.“
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