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Is TESSA right for my project?

The fastest way to find out: pick the description that fits you best.

I'm a consultant or engineering office

You bid on feasibility, pre-design, and variant studies for thermal energy projects, and the work is fee-capped or fixed-price. The bottleneck is the time it takes to assemble building data, draw a network, size pipes, and run a credible business case — most of which happens in spreadsheets and one-off scripts.

With TESSA you:

  • Win more bids by quoting realistic, faster turnarounds.
  • Deliver the same scope in a fraction of the hours, so margin per project goes up.
  • Hand the client traceable numbers (every value tagged measured / modelled / default), not a spreadsheet they can't audit.
  • Run several variants side-by-side instead of one — making your recommendations more defensible.

I'm a municipality or energy planner

You're trying to decide whether a district heating or cooling network makes sense for a neighbourhood, a new development, or the whole town. You need an answer that is honest about uncertainty, robust to climate and retrofit assumptions, and that you can defend in front of a council or investor.

With TESSA you:

  • Screen opportunity areas in days, not months — without commissioning a full external study first.
  • See how the case holds up against 2040 / 2050 climate and a retrofitted building stock.
  • Compare 4G vs 5G, gas vs biomass vs heat pump, centralised vs distributed, before committing budget.
  • Get a 30-year cash-flow picture — NPV, IRR, payback, LCOE — in the same view as the energy results.

I'm a utility, ESCO, or project developer

You're building or expanding district networks and you need to evaluate many sites, prioritise the best ones, and de-risk investment decisions before they hit committee.

With TESSA you:

  • Run a consistent feasibility template across a portfolio of sites, not a bespoke study per project.
  • Quantify the value of phasing, of waste-heat recovery, of seasonal storage — variant by variant.
  • Pull tooling that previously needed three or four specialists into one platform: hydraulic sizing, geothermal field design, financial modelling, emissions accounting.
  • Use the MCP / Claude integration to automate sensitivity studies and reporting at scale (see What's New).

I'm a geothermal or GSHP designer

You're sizing borehole fields for single buildings or campuses and you care about long-term performance, not just day-one capacity. Most thermal-network tools punt on geothermal; most geothermal tools don't simulate the building or the network.

With TESSA you:

  • Size a ground-coupled field with proper thermal-response modelling (Theis / DLSC).
  • Model long-term ground thermal drift and design active regeneration.
  • Combine the borehole field with the rest of the system — building demand, heat pumps, peaking sources, financials — in one scenario.

I'm doing a 5G / anergy / ambient-loop project

This is a category most DHC tools simply cannot represent. TESSA models 5G networks natively: bidirectional flows, simultaneous heating and cooling, and building-level heat pumps on a low-temperature ambient loop.

If you've been bending a 4G tool to fit a 5G concept, that's the gap TESSA was built to close.

The scales TESSA fits

The same engine works whether you are studying:

  • A single building or complex — size a heat pump, model a borehole field, evaluate a retrofit, or test a future-climate scenario for one site.
  • A campus, microgrid, or anergy loop — a hospital, university, industrial site, or housing estate sharing a low-temperature ambient loop with building-level heat pumps.
  • A medium neighbourhood network — a few dozen buildings on a 4G or 5G network, with one or several heat sources.
  • A full city-scale DHC system — hundreds or thousands of buildings, multiple energy centres, base-load and peaking sources, seasonal storage, waste-heat recovery.

The workflow is the same; only the area you draw on the map changes.

Where TESSA fits in your project

TESSA is strongest in the phases where decisions are most expensive to get wrong:

  • Opportunity screening — is this area / site / building stock worth pursuing?
  • Feasibility and pre-design — peak demand, network size, source mix, rough CapEx and OpEx.
  • Variant studies — 4G vs 5G, gas peaker vs biomass, centralised vs distributed sources.
  • Tendering and investment cases — defensible numbers backed by traceable assumptions.

It continues to add value through pre-engineering, but it is not a replacement for detailed-design tools — see What TESSA does not do below.

What you need to start

Surprisingly little:

  • A geographic area — a polygon drawn on the map, or a list of building locations.
  • Building floor areas — automatic from the federal RegBL register in Switzerland; a simple table elsewhere.
  • Construction class and period — for the demand model (auto-filled from RegBL).

With just these, TESSA can estimate demand, generate a network layout, size pipes, and produce a first financial picture. Adding measured consumption, real cost data, or geotechnical surveys progressively sharpens the answer — but is never required to start exploring.

What TESSA does not do

We'd rather be clear about the limits than oversell:

Not in scope Why / alternative
Building-level HVAC design Use EnergyPlus, IDA-ICE, or similar for individual building systems
Detailed hydraulic transient analysis Steady-state peak-flow hydraulics; use EPANET or similar for water hammer, surge, etc.
Electrical grid modelling Thermal networks only; PV or grid-scale electrical modelling is outside scope
Detailed geotechnical design of borehole fields TESSA sizes fields for capacity; structural and drilling design needs site-specific geotechnical input
Carbon accounting to audit standards TESSA produces CO₂ estimates from fuel emission factors; for verified reporting, use a dedicated methodology

Confidence and data quality

District-scale results are typically reliable for feasibility decisions: annual energy totals, peak network power, and high-level financial indicators. Per-building results are less precise, especially for non-residential buildings where industrial and commercial activities can have a varying impact on energy demand. See Concepts — Data quality and confidence for more detail.

Still unsure if it's a fit? The fastest way to find out is to spend ten minutes with a real project — open the Getting Started walkthrough and see how far you get.