Event Description
This course is designed for forward-thinking home and business owners, builders, and architects who want to take control of their energy future and build truly resilient buildings. Renewable energy systems with solar and battery at home have two major benefits: (1) store the solar generation for use during high-priced times of day; and (2) keeping power to your home when the grid is down. The utility cost savings from load shifting benefit gets most of the attention, but the resiliency in case of blackouts could be just as valuable. This course evaluates solar and battery systems with resiliency as the main focus and economics as a key consideration.
You’ll discover how to correctly size batteries (where most systems fail), prioritize critical loads, and ensure your solar actually works during an outage. We will use case studies of homes and businesses keeping the power on in case of blackouts to understand the benefits through real-world examples. Homes can keep life-saving medical equipment running in case of a grid outage. Businesses can continue to serve their communities in case of a natural disaster. We’ll also cover emerging opportunities like virtual power plants, smart panels, and vehicle-to-home integration—turning your building into a high-performance energy asset, not just a consumer.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the benefits of renewable energy systems consisting of solar and battery storage
- Learn how to configure batteries so that critical loads are powered for days, not hours
- Analyze 24-hour to multi-day outage conditions, including seasonal solar variability, to ensure systems perform under worst-case conditions, not just ideal average assumptions.
- Use case studies to examine what use cases most benefit from grid-tied solar and storage
Learning Units
1.5 AIA LUs pending for this course
Instructors
Robert Fortunato, ForStrategy Consulting
Course Location
Zoom link provided upon registration.