Dept. of Energy releases initial version of the Spawn of EnergyPlus software

The U.S. Department of Energy, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have released the initial version of the Spawn of EnergyPlus software.

The government entities collaborated with Modelon and Objexx Engineering on the new tool. Spawn is not a replacement for EnergyPlus and won’t be in the foreseeable future.

Like its progenitor, the new tool performs whole-building energy simulation, but it also targets new use cases in advanced controls, district systems, and grid integration. Spawn supports these new use cases by making fundamental use of coupled simulation via the Functional Mockup Interface standard.

It reuses the weather, envelope, lighting, and loads models from EnergyPlus and packages them as a single model. But it replaces EnergyPlus’ traditional, imperative, implicit, load-based HVAC and controls models with explicit declarative state-based models from the Modelica Buildings Library that are translated and automatically linked with the EnergyPlus model.

By combining models in different configurations, Spawn simulates either a single building or a collection of buildings linked by shared thermal, electrical, and control systems.