ABSTRACT
Nowadays, large-scale natural disasters have frequently occurred at many places. To deal with the interruption of electricity supply due to natural disasters, many companies require to enhance resilience of office buildings. Introducing remote work is one of the ways to control their power demand. However, the existing disaster energy simulation models have not considered in detail how building users use electricity in the case of a grid outage, so the introduction of remote work could not be considered. This study proposes a model in which business damage costs are incurred according to the reduction in the number of employees in the office. In the proposed model, the power demand is broken down by the priority of working in the office. Using the cost model, we construct the simulation method that minimizes the cost of business damage in the case of a disaster by moving to remote work. We apply operational data to our simulation model assuming offices before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and conduct simulations of business continuity for 72 hours in the case of a sudden grid outage. From the results, it was found that the cost of business damage can be suppressed when remote work is regularly introduced during COVID-19. © 2022 IEEJ-IAS.