Resilience of centralized and distributed energy systems to grid outage in winter: a district-scale assessment in Colorado, USA

This study evaluates the thermal resilience of a district composed of seventeen buildings located in Colorado (USA) during a 36-hour winter power outage. The thermal performance of each building was simulated using EnergyPlus combined with MATLAB®. Three winter scenarios were investigated. The first corresponds to a baseline case where power comes from the grid. The second considers a decentralized photovoltaic (PV) system operating with and without storage. Finally, the third scenario evaluates a centralized district-level configuration based on shared PV generation, with and without storage. The results show that if PV generation alone delays the decrease in indoor temperature following the power outage, the integration of storage extends the metric as much as 16 h, depending on the building. In addition, the recovery time indicates reductions of up to 69 % when PV generation is combined with storage. Furthermore, the centralized strategy is capable of sustaining the prioritized buildings for nearly the entire 36-hour outage period. Overall, the results suggest that coordinated energy-sharing strategies can substantially improve district thermal resilience while simultaneously reducing storage requirements.