About the BCL

The Building Component Library (BCL) is the U.S. Department of Energy’s comprehensive online searchable library of energy modeling building blocks and descriptive metadata. Novice users and seasoned practitioners can use the freely available and uniquely identifiable components to create energy models and cite the sources of input data, which will increase the credibility and reproducibility of their simulations.

The BCL contains components which are the building blocks of an energy model. They can represent physical characteristics of the building such as roofs, walls, and windows, or can refer to related operational information such as occupancy and equipment schedules and weather information. Each component is identified through a set of attributes that are specific to its type, as well as other metadata such as provenance information and associated files.

The BCL also contains energy conservation measures (ECM), referred to as measures, which describe a change to a building and its associated model. For the BCL, this description attempts to define a measure for reproducible application, either to compare it to a baseline model, to estimate potential energy savings, or to examine the effects of a particular implementation.

The BCL currently contains more than 30,000 components and measures. A search API has been implemented on the BCL that allows users to filter through the search results using various facets. Facet categories include component and measure types, data source, and energy modeling software type. All attributes of a component or measure can also be used to filter the results. Visit the tags and attributes page for a complete list of tags used to categories the content and attributes that can be used to narrow down search results. The API Documentation page has API syntax guidance as well as search and download examples.