Sefaira Deploys EnergyPlus in the Cloud

LONDON and NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Aug 21, 2013) - Sefaira recently announced that it has integrated EnergyPlus as a thermal analysis engine to work alongside Sefaira Fulcrum (Sefaira's existing engine for rapid energy modeling). Both of these are now available within the award-winning Sefaira web application -- the industry's leading software for high performing building design. EnergyPlus is a comprehensive building energy simulation program developed by the US Department of Energy, built over several decades by US government research labs. With the new announcement, EnergyPlus is now accessible to architects & engineers, thereby empowering the world's top designers to leverage leading technology in designing sustainable buildings. Sefaira's users will immediately benefit from this via Sefaira's Thermal Comfort Analysis capability, which makes it easier for them to design buildings with minimal requirement for heating and cooling systems. Because mechanical heating and cooling are amongst the biggest users of energy in buildings, this offers great new opportunities to create high performing buildings designs that are both more economical and more sustainable.

EnergyPlus simulates building energy performance in significant detail, but has not previously been easily accessed by architects. Firstly, EnergyPlus has traditionally relied on a prohibitively complex interface, and secondly it was originally developed to run on desktop computers which meant that many days could be required to analyze different building designs (due to the limited processing capability of desktop computers and the complexity of calculations required to analyze energy flows). With integration into Sefaira, users now benefit from an intuitive web-interface and integration directly into traditional CAD environments, meaning that users can design without having to learn how to use the complex EnergyPlus interface. Furthermore, EnergyPlus has also been deployed to Sefaira's cloud platform, thereby reducing simulation time by orders of magnitude over traditional desktop simulation. In order to do this, Sefaira's team of engineers and software developers have created sophisticated technology which automatically distributes the analysis to Sefaira's cloud platform so that designers can get their results in seconds rather than the hours or days traditionally expected when using desktop computers.

"Sefaira is committed to making world-class technology accessible to architects to enable them to incorporate performance-based decision-making in the buildings they design," said Varun Singh, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Development at Sefaira. "EnergyPlus is arguably the most powerful energy-modeling engine in the market. Given our vision of deploying the best technology for any job, it was natural for us to deploy EnergyPlus alongside our existing Fulcrum engine, meaning that rather than having to choose between speed and depth of analysis, Sefaira offers the best of both worlds. We truly appreciate the work done by the US Department of Energy, and particularly the energy simulation group responsible for EnergyPlus development."

The new version of Sefaira which incorporates EnergyPlus is already available to all existing and new Sefaira customers as part of their subscription to the software.

About Sefaira

Founded in 2009, Sefaira (http://www.sefaira.com) produces cloud-based energy efficiency software to help architects design high-performing buildings. Using Sefaira, architects and other building designers can analyse and compare multiple building strategies within a fraction of the time and cost previously required. This includes defining, quantifying, and optimising the energy, water, carbon and financial benefits of relevant design strategies.

Sefaira won Gold at the 2013 Ecosummit award in Berlin as well as the "Green Building Innovation of the Year" award at London's Ecobuild 2011. It has been named to the Red Herring Top 100 Europe in 2013 and Going Green Global Top 200 private companies in 2012. Sefaira has offices in London and New York.