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History of EPOS-Plan

The main initiator, developer and contact for EPOS-Plan is INEKON – Intelligente Energiekonzepte in Stuttgart, Germany. INEKON developed the software out of its own planning practice, drives its further development and supports users under licence and maintenance agreements.

The name

EPOS stands for Energy, Planning, Optimisation and Simulation – the four tasks the program brings together: determining energy demand, planning the plant, optimising the interaction of its components and simulating operation over a full year.

Born out of practice

At the beginning there was a question that came up in every project: how large does a generator really have to be so that it operates economically over the year? Simplified methods answer this only inadequately because they work with annual totals. What matters is the time course of demand and generation – and that is what EPOS-Plan was designed for from the start: an annual simulation in hourly steps that brings together sizing, operation and economics.

The first program generation

For many years the software was maintained and continuously extended as a calculation program based on Excel. Its scope grew from the design of combined heat and power units through heat demand calculation for buildings and district heating areas to solar thermal, photovoltaics, storage and a complete economic assessment. Key development steps of that generation were the continuous adaptation to the German CHP legislation of 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2020, the update of the climate data sets up to TRY 2015 including forecast data, the extension of the building and plant databases and, in 2024, the change of the economic calculation to the net present value method and report output as a Word document.

Redevelopment as a standalone application

With growing requirements – higher time resolution for self-consumption and storage, larger data volumes, a modern user interface, independence from Office versions – the Excel basis reached its limits. INEKON therefore rebuilt EPOS-Plan completely: as a standalone Windows application with its own database, its own result presentation and a calculation core that covers the heat side in 8,760 hours and the electricity side in 35,040 quarter hours. Among the new capabilities are the automatic retrieval of climate data, heat pump performance maps with selectable heat source and operating strategy, management of thermal storage with switching thresholds, the self-sufficiency and self-consumption analysis, CSV export of all time series and a help system with context hints and assistant.

With this redevelopment the version numbering also starts anew: the first release of the new generation carries version 1.0.0.0 and was published in July 2026. Which functions are added with which version is listed in the Update log.

Availability and support

EPOS-Plan is developed, maintained and distributed by INEKON – Intelligente Energiekonzepte. Contact details are given under Company; an overview of today’s scope of functions is provided under Features and in the Documentation.