The DOE-2 software was developed by James J. Hirsch & Associates (JJH) in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), with LBNL DOE-2 work performed mostly under funding from the United States Department of Energy (USDOE) and other work performed mostly under funding from a wide range of industry organizations and ourselves.  This site, however, is not sponsored or endorsed by either USDOE or LBNL, and use of “DOE” in names in this site does not imply any endorsement or recommendation of any listed products or services by the United States Government, LBNL, or anyone else.

eQUEST^® is a sophisticated, yet easy to use, freeware building energy use analysis tool that provides professional-level results with an affordable level of effort.  eQUEST was designed to allow you to perform detailed comparative analysis of building designs and technologies by applying sophisticated building energy use simulation techniques but without requiring extensive experience in the "art" of building performance modeling.  This is accomplished by combining schematic and design development building creation wizards, an energy efficiency measure (EEM) wizard and a graphical results display module with a complete up-to-date DOE-2 (version 2.2) building energy use simulation program.  You can read the eQUEST Overview to get a more complete summary of the features and capabilities of this excellent program.

 eQUEST 3.65 is the most recent release.  For descriptions of the new features read this document.  eQ_WthProc can convert EnergyPlus (epw) files into eQUEST/DOE-2 (bin) files, see weather data area below.

You can see more information about eQUEST including download of program and documentation. You can also view the eQUEST download area to see recent versions of the program, documentation and updates.

Note: eQUEST is Qualified Software for Calculating Commercial Building Tax Deductions first enacted under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT), later extended by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and most recently extended and modified by the PATH Act of 2015. eQUEST 3.65 is qualified, effective 19 October 2016, for buildings placed into service on or after to January 1, 2016; eQUEST 3.63b is qualified, effective 9 September 2009, for buildings placed into service prior to January 1, 2016. The requirements for software to be qualified for use in these deductions were first covered by IRS Notice 2006-52 and then amplified by IRS IRB 2008-14 and again clarified by IRS IRB 2012-17 with further guidelines provided by DOE and added DOE guidelines for buildings placed in service in 2016 and later.  The submission packages, including ASHRAE Standard 140 testing, can be found here.

DOE-2 is a widely used and accepted freeware building energy analysis program that can predict the energy use and cost for all types of buildings. DOE-2 uses a description of the building layout, constructions, operating schedules, conditioning systems (lighting, HVAC, etc.) and utility rates provided by the user, along with weather data, to perform an hourly simulation of the building and to estimate utility bills. The “plain” DOE-2 program is a “Command Prompt” program which requires substantial experience to learn to use effectively while offering researchers and experts significant flexibility; eQUEST is a complete interactive Windows implementation of the DOE-2 program with added wizards and graphic displays to aid in the use of DOE-2.

PowerDOE is not available as it has been discontinued in favor of eQUEST. PowerDOE is our previous generation (1990's “legacy”) application; use eQUEST for the most up-to-date user interface and DOE-2 simulation capabilities.  PowerDOE included an earlier version DOE-2.2 as its simulation "engine" for all energy and cost calculations.  Note that PowerDOE was designed for previous generations of Windows and will not operate properly when installed in more recent versions such as Windows 7.  For this reason PowerDOE has been discontinued.

The Life-Cycle Costing (LCC) analysis method is recognized to reliably identify cost optimal building design solutions yet it is not widely used with confidence.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and ANSI have suggested standardized LCC nomenclature and conventions so that the entire buildings industry can speak one "language" when performing LCC analysis.  NIST's LCC procedures are embodied in the Building Life-Cycle Cost (BLCC) Program; the NIST BLCC program and related utilities can be downloaded here. Although the LCC procedures used in BLCC have long been published (NIST Handbook 135 1995 Edition) some users express concern that BLCC does not display the intermediate details of its calculations. For this reason we have developed a spreadsheet version of BLCC procedures. Users of our spreadsheet version report greater confidence with its user-friendly "glass box" implementation of BLCC. Our BLCC spreadsheet includes year 2015 USDOE energy price escalation rates and is available FREE in Excel OfficeXP format (April 2016 version posted 4/22/2016.) View a detailed description of this spreadsheet tool (sample screens, advantages, limitations) or a summary of recent (2015 version) enhancements.