Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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Good question. Here's the situation. Several years ago, the NREL residential team moved away from the BeOpt platform for their own internal work towards a workflow based initially on OpenStudio and the OpenStudio API and more recently on HPXML and HPXML-OpenStudio-EnergyPlus translation. Development of BeOpt and direct-to-EnergyPlus workflows has ceased as you can obviously tell by the growing gap between the most recent EnergyPlus version (9.2 soon to be 9.3) and the one used in BeOpt (8.7).
The success of the HPXML path and DOE's recent-ish re-commitment to get out of the user interface business (see 2018 announcement about OpenStudio Application) mean that DOE and NREL will likely not resume BeOpt development. An official decision and announcement has not been made, but the fact that active development has ceased has the same effect. Now, just because DOE and NREL are not continuing to develop BeOpt, that doesn't mean a third-party cannot. However, a BeOpt transition is more complicated than an OpenStudio Application one because BeOpt relies on a number of proprietary libraries and cannot be easily made open source. The future of BeOpt--and whether it is worth doing the work to enable a potential future for BeOpt--is a topic of ongoing discussion within DOE and NREL. At some point in the near future, we will make some public inquiries about potential paths forward, reach a decision, and post an official announcement. Until then, and perhaps even after then but certainly until then, things will remain in their current frozen state. Thanks for your patience.
