Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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The answer to your question is a solid "Possibly, but it'll probably require some work". Generally speaking, the challenge you are going to face is that there is a lot of global data that is intertwined with the operation of the component parts of EnergyPlus that makes completely separate use of the component parts difficult. Basically, the chiller component will probably assume that things are set up (e.g. global data arrays) and if the full set up is not done, that will eventually lead to bad things. In the future, this should be easier as more parts of EnergyPlus are refactored to be more object oriented.
However, for an ever-growing number of components we have unit tests that provide a roadmap on how to use things separately. In your specific case, take a look here. There are a couple of examples of setting up the chiller component and making sure things work as expected. One possible path would be to write a unit test (or modify one that is already there) to do something like what you want. If you can do that, then the EnergyPlus part is solved and you would have demonstrated that what you want is possible with things as they are. Getting something working and hooked up to Python could still be pretty challenging, but presumably that sort of thing has been done before.
