Climate change presents serious challenges for effective infrastructure management, safety, and standards of living. Both climate change itself and our response to climate change, in part through reorganization of industrial systems (e.g., electricity supply) for decarbonization, create dynamics that make flexibility and responsiveness in the face of challenges extremely valuable. These emerging dynamics highlight the value of understanding infrastructure systems as ways of providing services, particularly in the context of energy services. In particular, understanding energy system reliability to refer to providing people access to critical energy services under all circumstances, rather than as a measure of equipment uptime or similar traditional metrics, unlocks opportunities to identify ways that systems can collectively provide energy services under increasingly challenging conditions. Residential building efficiency presents a major opportunity to ease provision of critical energy services even under very challenging supply-side conditions, such as extreme heat. Residential building efficiency provides energy services both to people, for example by enabling buildings to remain at safe temperatures with limited or no external heating and cooling, and to the system as a whole, for example by structurally reducing peak loads that drive overall electric grid size. Investing in demand-side interventions can improve human safety and comfort while also reducing the scale of supply-side interventions that will be necessary for full decarbonization. The numerous cobenefits of residential building efficiency are likely to increase in value as climate change proceeds. This talk will present results from analysis of deep building efficiency under climate change and decarbonization.
