ASHRAE Journal - December 2019 - 21

TECHNICAL FEATURE

and endorsed by the relevant ASHRAE Technical
Committees with TC 4.7, Energy Calculations,12 becoming the cognizant technical committee. The Title,
Purpose, and Scope were approved by the ASHRAE
Standards Committee in October 2011. A new ASHRAE
Standard Project Committee (SPC) was formed, a call
for members was disseminated and the ﬁrst SPC meeting occurred at the 2012 ASHRAE Annual Meeting in San
Antonio, Texas. The initial SPC 209 roster included 51
people with 29 voting members. SPC 209 was made up of
relevant industry stakeholders including BEM software
developers (producers), BEM software modelers and
designers (users), as well as those with general interest such as industry non-governmental organizations
(NGOs). A timeline of the development of Standard 209
is shown in Figure 1 and includes the time from approval
of the initial TPS to the publication of the standard in
April of 2018. Numerous volunteer ASHRAE committee
members, public reviewers and ASHRAE staff contributed to make ASHRAE Standard 209 a reality.

Organization of the Standard
Standard 209 is laid out starting with the Purpose
(Section 1), which is stated as: "Deﬁne minimum
requirements for providing energy design assistance
using building energy simulation and analysis," followed by the standard's Scope (Section 2), which is
deﬁned as: new buildings or major renovations of, or
additions to, existing buildings using energy simulation during the design process. The standard does not
apply to single-family houses, multifamily structures
of three stories or fewer above grade, manufactured
houses (mobile homes), or modular homes. Next is
Deﬁnitions, Abbreviations and Acronyms (Section 3).
Then the standard covers Utilization (Section 4), which
addresses how the standard is employed, followed by
General Requirements (Section 5), which describe the
types of analysis needed in addition to the requirements
of a generic modeling cycle. After a lengthy literature
review and initial drafts of Standard 209, it was determined that many energy modeling processes were common between different phases of design. These common
BEM activities were thus placed in Section 5, General
Requirements, so that the rest of the standard could
focus on the modeling tasks that were speciﬁc to different project phases or design objectives.
The energy modeling cycles are then organized into

FIGURE 1 Standard 209 development.
Title, Purpose and Scope Approved

October 2011
ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 209-2018

June 2012

SPC 209 Began Meeting

Energy Simulation Aided
Design for Buildings
Except Low-Rise
Residential Buildings
Approved by ASHRAE on March 30, 2018, and by the American National Standards Institute on April 2, 2018.

Draft 1 Released (PPR/1)

March 2016

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© 2018 ASHRAE

May 2017

Draft 2 Released (PPR/2)

Draft 3 Released (PPR/3)

January 2018

December 2017
Approved by ASHRAE Standards Committee

Approved by ASHRAE Board

April 2018

ISSN 1041-2336

February 2018
Publication

PPR = Publication Public Review (required by the ANSI/ASHRAE standards process)

Design Modeling Cycles (Section 6), Construction and
Operations Modeling (Section 7) and Post-Occupancy
Modeling (Section 8). Once meeting discussions commenced, it became apparent that the design phases
shouldn't stand in isolation since building energy performance is so closely connected to how a building and
its systems are installed and commissioned, as well as
how they are operated and maintained. The document
then concludes with Normative References (Section 9),
followed by six Informative Appendices to assist users of
the standard.
The standard's informative appendices include:
* Appendix A - Climate Information: Provides guidance on obtaining relevant Typical Meteorological Year
(TMY) and Actual Meteorological Year (AMY) weather
data for BEM.
* Appendix B - Benchmark Information: Provides
guidance and resources to assist with benchmarking a
building's energy use.
* Appendix C - Simple Box Modeling: Provides details and examples on how to perform simple box modeling in accordance with Section 6.1, Modeling Cycle #1
- Simple Box Modeling.
* Appendix D - Owner's Project Requirements
(OPR): Examples of the requirements relevant to BEM
activities to assist with compliance with Section 5.6.1,
Energy Performance Goals in OPR.
* Appendix E - Quality Assurance and Quality Control Checklists: Includes information supporting the
requirements of Section 5.7.4, Quality Assurance; and
* Appendix F - Informative References.
D E C E M B E R 2 0 19

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ASHRAE Journal - December 2019

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