Over 300 local authorities have declared climate emergencies and set ambitious targets to reach net zero.
Different local authorities will face different challenges, opportunities, and costs associated with decarbonisation, depending on their infrastructure, building stock, demographics and local grid capacity.
Until discovering Advanced Infrastructure's LAEP+ tool, accessing granular data, understanding the current energy demand profile and the ability to collaborate with other stakeholders involved in local area energy planning had been the main challenges for our local authority customers.
Working closely with Local Authorities, Distribution Network Operators, Consultants, Advanced Infrastructure’s LAEP+ tool is currently being used to build energy plans, respond to grants as well as identify and triage buildings suitable for energy intervention.
LAEP+ is a collaborative web-based mapping and design tool that helps Local Authorities, Distribution Network Operators and Consultants come together to plan and develop new energy systems such as power, heat and transport.
Web based and cloud based enables the 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.
"The tool has been a strong asset to our EV team, allowing us to assess and shortlist potential charge point sites based on a number of factors including network capacity, availability of off-street parking and proximity to existing charge points.This is an invaluable step saving time and resources in the implementation process. On top of this, we’ve added in our own data layers. This has provided geographical insights to our charge point utilisation that was previously unavailable."
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.
