In 1993 the Simulation Research Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and James J. Hirsch & Associates (JJH) started developing a new version of the DOE-2 building energy simulation program. This new version, to be called DOE-2.2, was intended to replace the current version, DOE-2.1E. Funding the development efforts were the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Electric Power Research Institute, and others.

Despite several years of negotiations, DOE and LBNL were unsuccessful in reaching a cross-license agreement with JJH on distribution of DOE-2.2. Therefore, DOE and LBNL decided not to issue an official, government-sanctioned version of DOE-2.2. Accordingly, no entity has the right to claim that their product is, or was, derived from an official version of DOE-2.2. Also, private sector entities are prohibited from using the "DOE" acronym on any unofficial version of DOE-2.2 or any other product that utilizes or incorporates source code from DOE-2.2 or portions thereof where such use could result in the likelihood of confusion by the public.

DOE-2.1E is the last official version of DOE-2. LBNL will continue to maintain and provide bug fixes for DOE-2.1E and support DOE-2.1E users.

Since 1996 DOE has been funding LBNL, the University of Illinois, the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory and others to develop EnergyPlus, new software intended to replace both DOE-2 and BLAST (a whole-building energy analysis program sponsored by the Department of Defense). Building on the strengths of DOE-2 and BLAST, EnergyPlus includes a number of innovative simulation features, such as variable time step and modular systems that are solved simultaneously with a heat balance-based zone simulation. The first version of EnergyPlus was released in April 2001. To make it easy for current DOE-2 and BLAST users to move to EnergyPlus, utilities are available to convert BLAST and DOE-2 input files for use in EnergyPlus. If you would like to download a free copy of EnergyPlus, click here.

Questions about DOE-2.2 or EnergyPlus development should be directed to Drury B. Crawley at the U.S. Department of Energy.