PHILADELPHIA — Performance Systems Development (PSD) is the first commercial organization approved by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to deliver OpenStudio® training courses for building professionals, software developers, and utility administrators. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), OpenStudio is a collection of cloud-based software tools for modeling the energy and water usage performance of buildings.

PSD will deliver a range of OpenStudio courses to teach building professionals how to leverage the five graphical applications that make up the modeling system, including: EnergyPlus, the SketchUp Plug-in, the ParametricAnalysis Tool, RunManager, and ResultsViewer. Students will learn how to develop effective modeling workflows using these applications, by graphically generating building form and fabric boundaries and assigning space classifications and attributes to them. PSD will introduce students to standardized modeling techniques using NREL’s Building Component Library (BCL), a platform that has the potential to significantly improve model quality and improve overall savings predictions. OpenStudio training courses will also demonstrate cloud-based analysis methods to assist in large scale parametric and optimization studies.

PSD’s Chris Balbach, VP of research and development, said, “PSD is excited to work closely with NREL in promoting the adoption of the OpenStudio platform and the software development kit (SDK). The robust content libraries, cloud-based analysis, and standardized workflows afforded by OpenStudio form the basis for disruptive innovations in energy modeling to occur. Today’s energy modelers are under pressure to produce results faster, cheaper, and of higher quality. We see how OpenStudio makes this possible and expect large consumers of energy models — particularly utility energy efficiency programs — to realize significant gains in efficiency and productivity by adopting tools based on the OpenStudio SDK and the surrounding eco-system.”