EnergyPlus: a new-generation building energy simulation program

Many of the popular building energy simulation programs around the world are reaching maturity– some use simulation methods (and even code) that originated in the 1960s. For more than two decades, the U. S. government supported development of two hourly building energy simulation programs, BLAST and DOE–2. Designed in the days of mainframe computers, expanding their capabilities further has become difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Because of these problems, a U.S. federal agency began developing a new building energy simulation tool, EnergyPlus, building on the capabilities and features of BLAST and DOE-2. This paper focuses on the structure, features, and capabilities of EnergyPlus.