City Energy Analyst Urban Performance at your Fingertips
What began as a few lines of Python written during my doctoral studies at ETH Zürich in 2013 has grown into one of the most widely adopted open-source platforms for urban energy analysis in the world. City Energy Analyst (CEA) is today used in over 25 countries by more than a thousand engineers, researchers, and city planners — a reach that still feels remarkable for a tool born in an academic lab.
Over nearly a decade, I grew CEA from a personal research instrument into a thriving open-source project with a community of 40+ contributors spanning multiple countries. I led its evolution through my academic career at ETH Zürich and the ETH-Singapore Centre, and later brought it into real-world practice through Superurbana, where it powered commercial energy consultancy and training across Europe and the Middle East.
CEA is now in the capable hands of the next generation of PhD researchers at ETH Zürich — a fitting home for a tool that has always been driven by rigorous science and a commitment to open, transparent computation.