This is the project page for a U.S. Department of Energy sponsored effort to develop a Building Energy Modeling (BEM) information and education portal. Technical efforts are led by Model Efficiency, with the support of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Sustainable I.Q., and IBPSA-USA.
The primary goal for this website is to provide practical guidance to practitioners on how, when, and why to apply BEM at various steps in the design process and how to use the analysis to inform design decisions. It is intended to complement software-specific training offered by software vendors and others.
An initial focus of development has been to cater to beginner-level BEM practitioners but the scope will expand over time to include advanced material for more experienced practitioners. In addition to developing tutorials, the site also includes background material (e.g., building physics, HVAC) to support a better understanding of how buildings really work so that modelers can effectively interpret and communicate the modeling results.
The core of the website is the BEMcyclopedia wiki, which contains the tutorial information. Content has been developed by the project team, and through crowd-sourcing efforts. If you are interested in contributing to the wiki, then please read the contribution guidelines.
The website also includes an interactive lookup data feature to guide BEM practitioners on how to make model input assumptions during the early stages of design.
Finally, a curated set of links has been assembled which links to numerous other existing BEM resources on the web.