How many building energy modelers are there?

bem-community

asked 2015-03-23 20:01:52 -0500

1069 ●1 ●6 ●15 https://bigladdersoftware.com/

This is a question I always wonder about when I need to estimate the size of the BEM market (US, international, or otherwise). Someone must have figured out some good numbers by now. And yet I don't think I have seen any estimate published in the usual papers that discuss the BEM industry...at least the ones that I have found.

It seems like the question could be answered in two different ways:

How many people have "energy modeler" as their job title?, or
How many people use energy modeling in the course of their job?

I would be happy with either number.

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

Comments

Is there a source for current (or more recent) numbers about EnergyPlus, OpenStudio, and DOE 2.2 (or eQuest) usage numbers and downloads?

kwalkerman ( 2026-05-02 02:26:53 -0500 )edit

Hi! In the GitHub page you can find some indicators about it in the README file. The lastest version was downloaded 4.5k times. But I don't know if this number considers only downloads from GitHub or from the Web as well. As a comment, I'm using EnergyPlus everyday but I didn't download this version yet.

Hope this help you.

https://github.com/NatLabRockies/Ener...

hermmanhender ( 2026-05-07 01:23:38 -0500 )edit

add a comment

answered 2015-03-24 10:03:45 -0500

__AmirRoth__

4456 ●5 ●17 http://bleedinggreenna...

Here are two data points. First, the last four updates of EnergyPlus (7.2, 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2) have each been downloaded about 20,000 times. 20,000 seems high for EnergyPlus users, but lets use it for lack of a better estimate. Second, last year's round of AIA 2030 reporting showed that about 16% of projects that were modeled, were modeled using EnergyPlus (FWIW, most projects were modeled using either TRACE or DOE-2.2). Let's extrapolate from projects to users to mean that one of every six modelers uses EnergyPlus. That's probably a fair estimate at this point. Combining these, we get that there are 120,000 energy modelers in the world.

That seems insanely high—for comparison, there are 83,000 registered architects in the US and anecdotally the ratio of architects to modelers is at least 20 to 1—but it's one bottom-up estimate. It would be interesting to see estimates using other data sources.