Southern California projects are being shaped by a specific set of environmental pressures: extreme heat, wildfire smoke, drought, water reliability, grid instability, longer outages, and seismic risk. The takeaway from Simon Ubhi’s state-of-the-market perspective is that resilience can’t be treated as a generic add-on or a single-system solution. It has to be defined early, tied to the facility’s actual risks, and coordinated across disciplines.
How should projects in this region be approaching these challenges? Is there anything we’re missing?
Projects in Southern California should begin by naming the hazards they are actually designing for. The region’s challenges are not abstract: heat waves drive cooling demand, strain the grid, and create indoor health risks during outages. Wildfire and smoke events affect air quality, ventilation, filtration, and operational continuity. Drought and water reliability constraints create additional pressure, especially where fire response water is part of the resilience strategy. Grid reliability issues, including Public Safety Power Shutoffs and longer-duration outages, challenge the idea that standby generation alone is enough. Seismic risk adds another layer, particularly for facilities that need to maintain critical services or restart quickly after an event.
Our approach is to bring resilience context into every applicable project and promote those considerations with stakeholders as early as possible. Ideally, that happens during scope development. But the key point is that it is never too late to raise resilience questions if they have been missed. The goal is not to make resilience a separate conversation. It is to make it part of the project’s basic definition of performance.
That means resilience should be understood as more than backup power. A generator may be part of the answer, but it does not address the full risk profile of Southern California projects. Resilience has to be multidisciplinary. It can include water storage for firefighting, HVAC strategies such as chilled water connections for temporary chillers, and other discipline-driven planning measures that help a facility remain safe, functional, or recoverable during disruption.
In practical terms, Southern Region projects should:
- Define the hazard set early. Projects should identify which risks matter most: heat, smoke, outage, seismic, water, or a combination of these.
- Identify critical functions and acceptable downtime. Teams should clarify what the facility must continue to do during a disruption and how long it can tolerate reduced operation.
- Build for passive survivability where possible. Shade, envelope performance, and thermal comfort strategies can help a building remain safer during an outage.
- Plan for longer-duration outages with layered strategies. This may include right-sized standby power, PV plus storage where feasible, load shedding, and prioritization of critical loads.
- Address smoke season explicitly. Filtration strategy, outdoor air controls, and operational modes for sheltering should be part of the design conversation.
- Design MEP systems for recoverability, not just protection. Clear restart sequences, accessible isolation, maintainable equipment layouts, and a spares strategy can help facilities recover faster.
- Make resilience operational, not only capital. Owner training, emergency operating modes, and clear triggers for switching modes are part of the resilience plan.
The practical shift is from asking, “What backup system do we need?” to asking, “What does this facility need to keep doing, what conditions could interrupt that, and how do we design across disciplines so it can respond?”
What are we missing?
The common gap in adoption is the business case.
Resilience often adds first cost, and project teams need clearer ways to explain why that investment matters. The financial argument cannot stop at the cost of the resilience measure itself. It also needs to account for the cost of consequences: what happens when a school, hospital, or campus community experiences downtime, disruption, or loss of critical services?
That question is central because resilience value is often clearest during an event. If the project team cannot define what downtime costs, it becomes harder to justify the upfront investment. For some owners, the consequence may be operational disruption. For others, it may be the loss of critical services, reduced safety, interrupted learning, or the inability to support a campus community during a regional emergency.
The missing piece is not only technical. It is financial and strategic:
- What does downtime truly cost?
- Which functions are most important to protect or restore?
- What level of resilience is appropriate for the owner’s mission?
- How can the project team compare first cost against avoided consequences?
This is where resilience needs to be translated into owner-specific value. A school, hospital, or campus may each understand downtime differently. The business case has to reflect that difference.
What are the key things going well in this region? Where are the tailwinds?
There are several positive forces in the Southern California market.
First, owners and districts have recent lived experience with the risks. Heat, smoke, and outages are no longer distant scenarios. Because many stakeholders have experienced these disruptions directly, resilience conversations land faster than they used to. The market does not need as much convincing that these hazards matter.
Second, electrification and decarbonization work is accelerating. That creates an opening for resilience upgrades because systems are already being evaluated, modernized, or replaced. When projects are changing how buildings use energy, support loads, or plan for future operations, resilience can be integrated into that work rather than treated as a separate effort.
Third, many clients are becoming more open to campus-wide thinking. Instead of looking only at individual buildings, owners are considering central plants, distribution, and microgrid readiness. That broader view is important because many resilience strategies work better at a campus scale, where teams can think about shared infrastructure, critical loads, and long-term flexibility.
The tailwinds in the region include:
- Recent lived experience with heat, smoke, and outages. Owners and districts understand the risks more directly than they did before.
- Momentum around electrification and decarbonization. Modernization projects can create opportunities to incorporate resilience improvements.
- Increased openness to campus-wide planning. Clients are more willing to consider central plants, distribution strategies, and microgrid readiness rather than staying in single-building silos.
Taken together, these forces are changing the resilience conversation. Southern California projects are being pushed by real hazards, but they are also benefiting from owners who better understand the risks, systems that are already being modernized, and a growing willingness to think beyond one building at a time.
That is the state of the market: resilience is becoming more practical, more multidisciplinary, and more closely tied to how buildings actually need to operate in Southern California.