On the use of building energy simulation programs in the performance assessment of agricultural greenhouses

The paper explores possibility of using BES in performance evaluation of commercialagricultural greenhouses, focusing on the necessary adaptations and additional modelsrequired to obtain reliable results. The paper provides a high-level evaluation ofrelevant physical phenomena for energy performance of greenhouses. A comparisonis made regarding the importance of each phenomenon in normal buildings and ingreenhouses. The paper also need for models to predict the crop production and thenecessary validation of BES models for the prediction of performance in greenhouses.Preliminary validation by inter-model comparison shows promising results andindicates that BES can be used for the energy performance evaluation of greenhouses