Key findings

• Building energy efficiency retrofit programs improve resilience to extreme weather events, allowing buildings to maintain safe and comfortable conditions during power outages and reduce the overall stress on the grid. When utilities either do not evaluate the resilience benefits from building upgrades or evaluate only their impacts at the level of a single building or the grid, they undervalue the collective impact at the neighborhood scale—where multiple buildings have energy efficiency solutions.
   
• Quantifying the resilience benefits from building retrofits in terms of lower peak demand, reduced outage time, and decreased interruption costs can provide a simplified, more strategic approach and enable utilities to prioritize investments to address risks from extreme events.
   
• Programs should consider targeting multiple buildings in a specific neighborhood for energy upgrades to maximize participation and achieve the resilience benefits at the distribution grid level that are modeled in our study.
   
• Our analysis of approximately 4,000 commercial buildings and 40,000 households in southeast Westchester County, New York, finds that pairing building envelope measures with heat pumps and implementing them in multiple neighborhood buildings can reduce peak summer demand by 8% and lower the hours of outages in the absence of demand response programs by 63% during the peak summer month. 
   
• Though our analysis is limited to one part of Westchester County, we expect that efficiency upgrades would result in resilience benefits in other areas. To determine the specific resilience benefits of efficiency upgrades in other regions, analysis based on building stock, climate conditions, utility distribution capacities, and retrofit solutions is needed.
   
• Regulators and policymakers should require utilities to integrate the value of resilience from energy efficiency upgrades into their cost-benefit analyses, help standardize methodologies for valuing the resilience benefits, and encourage reporting of resilience data from programs to improve transparency and inform program planning and future investments.