Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
Just to clarify: the EPW file contains weather data, and the contents could come from many different sources. The contents of the EPW could be AMY (Actual Meteorological Year) or TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) or something else altogether (e.g. multiple years of synthetic data).
The connection between the contents of the EPW and the year that EnergyPlus labels results with depends upon a number of different inputs. For version 9.0 and later, the RunPeriod object allows the specification of start and end years. If the "Treat Weather as Actual" field is set to "No", then EnergyPlus will label the simulation with your input years and largely ignore the years in the EPW file. If the "Treat Weather as Actual" field is set to "Yes", then EnergyPlus will require that the start date (month, day, and year) appears in the EPW file (along with a few other things).
Check the I/O Ref section on the RunPeriod object for more details.
