For Solar Farm and Solar Park developers, identifying electricity networks with network capacity and land suitability is inherently difficult without the right data.
Without the right information, solar developers and planners risk spending excessively, losing revenues, and wasting time on excessive physical assessments. Sites take time to survey in person and connection to the electricity grid can be both expensive and slow to obtain.
Access to granular data about network capacity, viable connection points and land suitability is now available on a cloud based platform to support Solar Developers in identifying the optimal locations for Large Scale Solar projects and to collaborate with key stakeholders including Land Owners, Network Operators, and Local Authorities.
LAEP+ is a collaborative web-based mapping and design tool that helps Solar Developers, Local Authorities and Distribution Network Operators come together to plan and optimise the siting of commercial and utiltiy-scale solar projects.
Cloud based LAEP+ enables data to be kept up to date, shared across different groups as well as it being visualised, over-layed and brought together in one place.
By bringing LAEP+ to the market, our aim is to support those responsible in transitioning to renewable energy faster, cost-effectively and collaboratively from project inception, design, delivery and final implementation.
LAEP+ has enabled us to collaborate with many planners within the regions SSEN serves, to share network data and information from multiple sources alongside modelling best practice to build a clear picture of optimal pathways to reach net zero.
Project RESOP (Regional Energy System Optimisation Planning) aims to take a ‘whole system’ approach, by drawing together data from multiple sources into a single tool that can be used to plan retrofit and roll out of low carbon technologies (LCTs) like electric vehicle charge points.
In November 2021, following a public tender process, Advanced Infrastructure was appointed to provide an energy mapping tool for project LEO utilising Advanced Infrastructure’s LAEP+ software service. This provided an excellent opportunity to test and validate the value of geospatial solutions for local area energy planning.
In June 2021, Advanced Infrastructure and EB Charging were awarded funding from the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles to specify and build a cloud-based siting tool for EV charge points. The output was EV Site, an EV focussed instance of our planning tool LAEP+. Advanced Infrastructure’s Head of Product, Lily Cairns Haylor, discusses the challenges of siting EV charge points at scale and the ways digital approaches might accelerate the tricky process.
