CEA-4: UBEM for urban decarbonisation

#research · #teaching · #practice
CEA combines urban design and energy systems engineering. It lets you study the effects, trade-offs, and synergies of urban design scenarios and energy infrastructure plans — at the scale of a neighbourhood, a district, or a city.
Born at ETH Zürich in 2013, CEA has empowered architects, urban designers, and engineers in over 75 countries to simulate building energy performance and explore decarbonisation strategies. The CEA Team is committed to empowering researchers and practitioners to plan and design low-carbon cities.
Select any area in the world. Get a complete digital replica of buildings and streets — year of construction, usage, energy, emissions, costs.
Hourly demand predictions for hundreds of buildings. Compare scenarios for present and future districts side by side.
Solar on roofs and façades, geothermal, sewage heat. Estimate what's possible before you build.
Design and optimise heating and cooling networks. Trade off cost, emissions, and primary energy across the whole district.
Techno-economic potential of low-carbon technologies. Compare capital and operational costs, GHG emissions, and Pareto-optimal designs.
Need a custom workflow? CEA is plug-in ready. Build your own and let us know.
Whether you're a designer, a researcher, or an engineer, there's a CEA interface that meets you where you are.
A user-friendly GUI for non-programmers. Available for Windows and macOS.
Command-line interface for researchers and developers. Scriptable and reproducible.
Native integration into parametric urban design workflows via Rhino/Grasshopper.
Web-based version with cloud computing and an expanded feature set. Now in beta.
DOWNLOAD CEA-4 DESKTOP
We proudly call Zürich (CH) and Singapore (SG) home.
Looking for CEA Series 3? You can still download CEA Series 3 — v3.39.4 here. Access to legacy blog posts here.
Help us understand who's using CEA. You may receive newsletters occasionally.
Check how CEAers use CEA in their work.
Seven ways to be part of the CEA community — from using the tool, to contributing code, to teaching with it.
Hosted by the Chair of Architecture and Building Systems at ETH Zürich ↗ and uuen Company ↗, with a global community of contributors.
Co-inventor & Product Sponsor
Scrum Master & Software Engineer
Dev Team, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa)
Dev Team, Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA)
Meet the full team and alumni
CEA is an open-source urban building energy modeling platform for the design of low-carbon cities. It has been hosted by the Chair of Architecture and Building Systems at ETH Zurich since 2013.
© 2026 City Energy Analyst — ETH Zürich & uuen Company. Open-source under the MIT license.