Center for Resilient Design

On April 27, 2021, Executive Director Deane Evans of the Center for Building Knowledge and Center for Resilient Design was asked to serve as a panelist at the American Institute of Architect’s Live Action Climate Program: Resilience + Adaptation.

Deane and three other panelists, along with moderator Kathy Dorgan of Dorgan Architecture and Planning of Storrs, discussed resilience and community building with the goal of encouraging community involvement in neighborhoods through architecture and firm culture.

The panel addressed the shocks and stresses most critical to the built environment and the important role of architects in protecting people and property, including explaining the performance attributes of hazard mitigation, resilience, and adaptation as different approaches to address these shocks and stresses. Topics also included the qualities and characteristics of resilient and adaptable design strategies and the different roles and responsibilities of architects in promoting resilience goals.

Deane Evans, Executive Director of the Center for Building Knowledge and the Center for Resilient Design, is now also Associate Dean of Research for the Hillier College of Architecture.

Click here for more information about Deane and his new role at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

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Executive Director Deane Evans Addresses Resilience Task Force on December 11, 2019

On December 11, 2019, the Center for Resilient Design hosted the final meeting of the Resilience Task Force – a group of 400+ leaders from New Jersey and New York, spanning grassroots to environment to business to government.  The Task Force objective, over the course of 2019, has bee to build consensus on the resources and policies needed to galvanize adaptation action and to inform a 2020+ campaign for regional resilience. The campaign will range from awareness building to political advocacy.

CRD has participated in the Task Force since its inception and will continue to stay involved as it evolves from “consensus-building to coalition building.”

Center for Resilient Design Executive Director, Deane Evans, presents at the latest AtlanticLIVE Summit in Washington DC

The Center for Resilient Design’s Executive Director, Deane Evans, was an invited speaker at Blueprint: An AtlanticLIVE Summit on Infrastructure and Transportation in Washington, DC.  

AtlanticLIVE Summits are annual events – convened and produced by The Atlantic magazine  - that explore critical issues and potential paths forward for improving America’s infrastructure and transportation systems in the 21st century.  Each event brings together thought leaders who are shaping urban environments – policymakers, developers, professional experts, entrepreneurs & industry leaders. 

The most recent Summit – convened on December 4, 2019 - explored the impacts of climate change on the nation’s critical systems, together with potentially disruptive strategies for mitigating these impacts.    Mr. Evans, along with Grace Showalter, Vice President, Construction Performance Materials North America at BASF, discussed Sustainable Construction: Resilient Infrastructure That Protects Our Communities. 

The Center for Resilient Design joined more than 110 other NJIT research institutes, centers, and specialized laboratories at the 2019 NJIT Research Institutes, Centers and Laboratories Showcase and President’s Forum on November 14, 2019. It was a great opportunity to network and learn about NJIT's continuously growing NJIT’s research enterprise and share information about our projects with the NJIT community. 

Terra Meierdierck and Nilay Panchal represent the Center at the 2019 NJIT Research Institutes, Centers and Laboratories Showcase.

On Wednesday, October 16, government staff and energy consultants from across New Jersey convened in the Central King Building to discuss and provide input to a new CRD project focused on community microgrids. The project – funded by the US Department of Energy through the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities – is being led by NJIT’s Center for Resilient Design with support from Rutgers. The goal of the project is to improve the current status of the microgrid development process by identifying and developing procurement guidance that includes funding and financing options suitable for local communities. Ultimately, the project team will develop a local government procurement guide to financing advanced community microgrids that will outline the process that local stakeholders – like the ones who attended the meeting – can use to maximize the economic and resiliency benefits of a microgrid.

Advanced microgrids are more complex than single-site or campus-wide microgrids, as they deliver power to a group of independent facilities, often involving multiple distributed energy resources (DER) and crossing multiple “rights-of-way” (ROW).  In New Jersey, these advanced microgrids are known as “Town Center Distributed Energy Resource” microgrids or TCDER microgrids. TCDER microgrids distribute energy at a minimum to a cluster of critical facilities within close proximity within a municipal boundary that are capable of providing essential services and shelter for the public during and after an emergency situation. The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) is currently evaluating 13 feasibility studies for TCDER

The Financing Advanced Microgrids project has the following objectives:

• Analyze existing best practices to inform the development of the procurement/financing models - best practices may draw from lessons from other industries (e.g., energy-savings performance contracting) if deemed helpful;
• Identify the procurement and financing challenges facing New Jersey’s 13 TCDER applicants.
• Identify and consider alternatives and make recommendations to New Jersey state and local policy makers on how to address the challenges.
• Produce a guide grounded in legal, economic and regulatory realities to help New Jersey and jurisdictions across the United States better understand the process of procuring and financing advanced community microgrids; and
• Define industry-specific terms related to procurement, financing, and the electric sector to ensure the guide is beneficial to local government and other stakeholders.

The guide and training materials delivered at the conclusion of the project will couple guidance on microgrid procurement and financing with general recommendations for state energy offices, as well as state legislation, regulation, and/or policy guidance needed to remove barriers and/or enhance opportunities for the development of advanced microgrids applicable to both states in competitive energy markets and fully vertically integrated utilities. 

On Thursday, February 21, Director Evans attended the kick-off meeting of the Building Coastal Resilience for the NY-NJ Coastal Metropolitan Region Task Force in Newark.

75 experts and stakeholders from New Jersey and New York convened to explore innovative ways to adapt the NYC metropolitan region to sea level rise and coastal storms.  The Task Force will continue to convene over the coming 12 months to develop a coastal resilience action agenda and outreach campaign to better address and improve the coastal resilience of the region.

The Center for Resilient Design has launched the Community Microgrids Planning Academy—a multi-media online educational platform designed to instruct jurisdictions on how to collect, organize, and analyze infrastructure data for the purpose of creating effective microgrid development plans for their communities in order to proceed to the next stage in the overall microgrid development process: the technical feasibility assessment.

This Academy is the culmination of the Microgrids for Resilient Communities Planning Project (SPRAG-185828) undertaken by a multi-discplinary team led by the Center and including Greener by Design, LLC and the Regional Plan Association. The team assisted three jurisdictions in New Jersey—Galloway, Neptune, and Newark—in collecting information for and creating microgrid development plans robust enough to support a technical feasibility assessment.

The Academy incorporates the lessons learned from the microgrid development planning processes observed and documented in these three municipalities, supplemented by best practice information from regional and national sources.

Organized into 5 key sections – Microgrid Basics; the Microgrid Development Process; Community Microgrid Planning; Expert Tutorials; and Resources – the Academy is designed to:

• Explain what community microgrids are;
• Describe their potential economic and resilience benefits;
• Delineate the series of steps needed to develop, implement and manage a microgrid;
• and prepare municipal officials to more effectively engage with the growing level of microgrid development activity across the US.

Colette Santasieri, PhD, presents the results of a 2-year resilience research study to citizens of Greenwich, NJ, a township increasingly exposed to the impacts of flooding and storm surge.

Titled At Risk: Healthy Coastal Ecosystems and Resilient Communities and Economies in an Era of Climate Change: A Balanced Approach to Protecting People, Property and Nature in Historic Greenwich Township, New Jersey, the study explored design and engineering strategies to:restore and enhance the natural environment focusing on tidal wetlands; improve flood protection in the village; and protect upland habitats, farmland and historic structures and sites.   The project goal was to develop design and engineering approaches that have the power to protect people, property, and natural resources, strengthen the economy, and enhance the quality of life, not only in Greenwich Township, but in other coastal communities throughout the state.

The project also included a one-semester design studio at the NJIT College of Architecture and

Design.  The studio explored a series of approaches to help improve the physical and economic resilience of Greenwich, and the results have been loaded into an online platform:      

                                    www.greenwichdesignstudio.org

The studio’s three phases – Research, Strategies and Design – are presented as a series of YouTube videos.  Collectively, the videos describe a process that could be implemented by other jurisdictions – on the Delaware Bay and elsewhere – that are grappling with economic revitalization in the face of increased flood risk.