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History
 

ABOUT US

History

Team

Peter Lilienthal

Ted Ladd

Tom Lambert

Board of Advisors
 

HOMER grew out of NREL's Village Power Program. This was part of the US government's response to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Throughout the 1990's NREL was very active helping developing countries incorporate renewable power into their rural electrification program. NREL needed a model for its internal use to understand the design trade-offs between different system configurations. The original HOMER utilized specialized optimization software and ran on a UNIX workstation.

By 1997 we realized that a publicly available version of HOMER would be useful to a large and growing community of system designers who were becoming increasingly interested in renewable power.  We converted HOMER into a Windows application written in C++ and started distributing it over NREL's website.

Although HOMER's origins are with off-grid systems, we recognized that HOMER's optimization and sensitivity analysis capabilities could also  be useful for larger and grid-connected systems.  In 2001 we came out with Version 2.0, which was a major upgrade that could model grid-connected systems with multiple generators, including cogeneration systems and hydrogen technologies.  It also models emission constraints and pricing.

The US DOE wound down the Village Power Program after 2001, but HOMER continued to evolve thanks to private sponsors, who paid for enhancements. NREL, in conjunction with US AID, conducted numerous training workshops around the world.  In 2007, Dr. Peter Lilienthal, the original developer of HOMER took a sabbatical from NREL to research the market potential of HOMER as a commercial product. In 2009 NREL executed a commercial license, giving HOMER Energy, LLC. exclusive, world-wide rights to distribute and enhance HOMER.

 


 



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What people are saying about HOMER:

Best hourly assessment tool for hybrid renewable electric generation systems in the world – bar none.

Dr. Jan F. Kreider
Building Systems Program, University of Colorado, USA
 
HOMER ENERGY  •  720-565-4046  •  info@homerenergy.com  •  885 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO 80302, USA