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• Modeling plant evapotranspiration within standalone EnergyPlus models. • Validation of a container farm building energy model yields a usable template model. • Accuracy of model depends on crop-specific variables, such as Leaf Area Index. • Results highlight importance of accurately modeling HVAC systems of plant factories. Plant factories have developed within urban contexts following efforts to expand local food production, create local jobs, and provide alternatives to conventional agriculture with lower greenhouse gas emissions. One plant factory system, container farms, consists of artificially lit, vertically stacked hydroponic farms inside retrofitted shipping containers and support crop production in otherwise unused locations regardless of climate and daylight availability. Given their high energy intensity, municipalities considering container farms require reliable models to study their overall environmental performance and feasibility. While previous studies have used co-simulators to consider plant-air interactions within building performance simulation (BPS) tools, energy validation studies are lacking for such models. This research presents the validation of an EnergyPlus model of a hydroponic container farm in Boston, Massachusetts based on nine months of measured data. Despite shortcomings in predicting of hourly conditioning energy, the resulting calibrated energy model achieves a Normalized Mean Bias Error of 3% and a Coefficient of Variation of the Root-Mean-Square Error of 11%. Results show that through representing plant-air interactions within EnergyPlus and modeling cooling coefficient of performance as a function of outdoor air temperature, stakeholders can reliably predict annual container farm energy use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]