August 16, 2002—Energy-10 Version 1.5 — an upgrade to the original program developed at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) — was recently released. The program can calculate the operating costs of a facility over its lifetime.
The new Energy-10 includes a discounted cash-flow evaluation of a building over its lifetime and a more powerful graphing package. The cash-flow evaluation of a building is determined and discounted to the present value taking into consideration such factors as the initial cost of construction, mortgage payments, annual electric costs, and annual tax benefits. Costs can be estimated using simple scaling laws or users can supply their own cost estimates.
Energy-10 allows an architect to watch a detailed simulation of how a building will use energy and shows ways to reduce energy consumption. The software simulates a year of hour-by-hour operations and displays annual, monthly, or hour-by-hour energy performance graphs. It incorporates detailed historical weather data for 239 locations around the country, expandable to 3,945 locations, enabling architects to accurately match their building with a site’s weather patterns.
The program is being distributed by the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council in Washington, DC, which also provides training workshops and user support. For more information, call 202/628-7400, ext. 210.
