Prioritizing Facilities
In this REopt® course module, users will learn how to prioritize critical facilities, understand where to access inventory data, and explore priority areas for energy investment.
A critical facility is a structure that provides services that are essential for the safety, well-being, and economic viability of a surrounding community. The availability of these services drives faster recovery after disasters. Most critical facilities require electricity to function, and diesel generators have historically powered many of these sites during periods of grid variability or power outages. Advances in renewable energy and storage technologies have resulted in increasingly cost-effective options to improve the efficiency, resilience, and reliability of onsite energy systems for critical facilities.
The types of facilities considered critical should be determined by emergency management agencies in close coordination with individual communities, but can include:
Community Facing
Hospitals, Schools, Shelters, Gas Stations, Pharmacies, Places of Worship, Assisted Living Facilities, Urgent Care Clinics, Grocery Stores
Indirect Services
Fire Stations, Police Stations, Emergency Operations Centers, Correctional Facilities, Government Offices, Communication Towers, Water Treatment Facilities
Inventory Data
Critical facility inventory data is sometimes maintained by state emergency management agencies. However, data are often collected, organized, or maintained separately according to facility type. For example, a public health department may operate a database of hospital locations, while a pollution control agency may maintain detailed wastewater treatment facility data. Collecting a comprehensive inventory of critical facility locations at the state or local level can involve significant interagency coordination. The Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Infrastructure Foundation Level Data provides a regularly updated national inventory of critical facility locations and attributes across dozens of categories. While these layers may not be as accurate as data collected by state or local agencies, they provide an effective starting point for any inventory effort.
There are hundreds of thousands of critical facilities across the U.S. and several thousand in each state. Given limited resources, how should we determine which facilities to power with onsite resilient energy systems? Where is resilient backup power most needed for community resilience? This question can be answered only through extensive engagement with community members and other stakeholders. However, some preliminary analysis, like the approach described below, can lay a foundation for successful engagement efforts.
Priority Areas
In the map below, critical facilities have been analyzed to allow decision makers to select high-priority areas for onsite energy investments. First, facilities are overlayed with information about community vulnerability such as the percent of Medicare recipients requiring electricity-dependent medical devices, or the percent of household income spent on electricity (energy burden). These metrics allow you to filter thousands of facilities to show only areas most in need of resilient energy.
Try this: Filter the critical facility map below to understand which facilities are in areas that meet resilience metric criteria. How many grocery stores across Iowa meet the following criteria: above average energy burden, below average past Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mitigation investment, above average natural hazard risk? Hint: scroll down on the righthand panel to filter facilities by type.
In this example, map filters are used to determine how many grocery stores meet different resilience metric criteria.
Next, each critical facility is assigned a score according to the services it provides and its proximity to similar facilities. Facilities are grouped into clusters that mimic the likely distribution of grid infrastructure, and facility scores are aggregated for each cluster. The two highest-scoring clusters in each county are flagged as high priority "resilience hubs." This approach allows you to identify facilities that meet whichever criteria are most meaningful for your project.
Powering clusters of neighboring facilities with resilient energy ensures that community members can reliably access multiple critical services in fewer trips, which minimizes social burden.
Scoring Critical Facilities
What Level of Service is Provided?
Assigning relative "service scores" to facilities according to their type allows you to quickly compare the relative importance of all facilities in an area. FEMA's seven community lifelines provide an effective framework for categorizing service scores. For example, a hospital may provide a high level of service in FEMA's health and medical lifeline category, while a gas station may provide a lower level of service across several lifelines–food, water, energy, and transportation.
How Far is the Nearest Alternative?
Calculating the distance between each facility and the nearest facility of the same type can help you understand the relative criticality of each facility in an area. For example, a pharmacy 5 miles from the nearest pharmacy would receive relatively higher priority than pharmacies clustered closer together.
Selecting critical facilities for energy investment is a complex process, and the role of community resilience hubs extends far beyond providing reliable power. The prioritization approach described above does not consider existing funding opportunities, interagency relationships, community priorities, or the availability of better data. Community engagement should always drive the prioritization of critical facilities for resilience hubs and metrics like those shown in the maps above should only be used as a starting point to support a more collaborative prioritization process.
Once you've selected a high-priority critical facility for assessment, you're ready to explore onsite energy systems for that site using REopt. Find out more about REopt in the next module.