LAEP+

Core Features

Advanced Infrastructure's LAEP+ platform uses a spatial, data-led approach, combining its digital twin and energy datasets with modelling tools for local energy planning. Some of its main capabilities are:

• Interactive Energy Mapping: Overlays granular energy, heat, building, transport, and network datasets to explore local opportunities and constraints.

• Scenario Modelling: Builds long-term technology deployment scenarios using factors including net-zero targets, budgets, local priorities, and renewable potential.

• Project Assessment: Tests building-level low-carbon interventions and provides feasibility results, estimated costs, and carbon-saving breakdowns.

• Site Identification: Uses spatial queries to screen locations for technologies such as heat pumps, solar installations, renewables, and EV charge points.

• Custom Data & Reporting: Accepts user datasets in formats including CSV, GeoJSON, GPKG, and ESRI Shape, alongside tools for creating and sharing reports.

• Collaborative Planning: Supports shared planning between councils, energy networks, consultants, and other stakeholders, including geospatial data stories and feedback.

Closing Insights

LAEP+ addresses a central challenge in the energy transition: local net-zero targets ultimately have to translate into decisions about where and when heat pumps, building retrofits, renewable generation, EV charging and supporting grid capacity are deployed. Local Area Energy Planning provides a framework for coordinating these changes, while LAEP+ gives authorities and network operators a shared digital environment for testing pathways, identifying projects and aligning infrastructure investment with anticipated demand.

The platform is now used by hundreds of UK local authorities. UK Power Networks has made LAEP+ freely available to all 133 authorities in its service area, helping councils evaluate low-carbon technology scenarios while giving the network operator greater visibility of future electricity demand. Its LAEP+-based Customer Planning Portal is projected to save consumers £6.7 million over five years. SSEN’s LENZA, also built on LAEP+, has reached 95% adoption across its licence area and supported more than 180 local energy projects, helping connect local decarbonisation ambitions with longer-term grid planning.

This role becomes increasingly important as electrification shifts demand toward electricity networks and councils move from climate commitments to implementation. LAEP+ can model long-term decarbonisation pathways against budgets and net-zero targets, then assess specific low-carbon projects for costs and carbon savings. Commercial licences cost £20,000 annually for one local-authority area or £80,000 for nationwide UK coverage.