New energy markets & grid-interactive buildings
by Elena Bondareva
In 2021, I was invited to develop a series (linked below) on grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) for the Facilities Management Journal, a publication of the International Facilities Management Association. The purpose of the series is to introduce GEBs, demystify jargon, and unpack GEBs' indisputable benefits GEBs pose for society, the real estate industry, individual facility/asset managers looking for an edge, and the profession as a whole as it seeks to attract talent.
In 2023, I had the honor of contributing a chapter to Extreme Green Buildings, an e-book by a preeminent sustainability publication TheFifthEstate. In that chapter, I illustrated solutions for the interactive energy future on a day in a life of a facility/asset manager operating a grid-interactive precinct.
Why am I passionate about grid-interactive buildings?
Accountable for 40% of global greenhouse emissions and for three fourths of the total US electricity consumption and even more at peak, buildings play a key role in the economy and in climate change action. The real estate industry has embraced this and amassed a proportional response to the energy efficiency, embodied carbon, and net-zero challenges. Still, buildings have remained a largely passive consumer of energy: they use the electricity they need whenever they need it, disconnected from the rhythms of renewable energy and blind to the stress inflexible loads create for the grid.
This passive approach impedes the transition to the clean-energy future and misses significant opportunities to engage consumers and to align operations with organizational commitments to climate action.
Moreover, it overlooks the fact that clean energy has shifted from a “perishable” commodity to a tradable one. The future of energy is interactive!
You may have heard that if you are not using your credit cards to earn rewards, you are subsidizing other people’s holidays. Well, the same holds here: if you are not mobilizing your real estate asset as a distributed energy resource (DER), you are leaving money on the table. The real estate industry is facing its next opportunity to step up, transforming the CapEx and OpEx business cases while slashing the costs of “doing the right thing.”
Please let me know whether you are finding this helpful and what you’d like to hear more of.