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Enplanner is designed to to allow developers and planning officers to meet local planning requirements for onsite renewable energy generation by sizing RE generation installations based upon the development's energy demand as well as local resource maps. This online tool is highly polished, user-friendly and effective for its purpose.
http://enplanner.com/
This tool is part of a group, click the icon to see the tools in the group.
This is a very strong product but with a very limited narrow scope so has limited use. A highly automated tool,the local authority planning requirements and renewable energy generation potential for specific areas are pre-loaded. The tool will then automatically generate an energy statement, that should be for example included in a planning application. The scope of the tool is however very narrow, it doesn't provide other information e.g. cost associated with RE plants. During the revision of available resources step, the tool seems to freeze when reviewing the potential for unlikely renewable sources in the area such as hydroelectricity. This then requires refreshing the page.
Enplanner is designed to help with a very specific area of planning policy – renewable onsite energy generation. The original idea emerged from several local authorities in the West Midlands, who, along with the Carbon Trust and Encraft have helped develop the toolkit. It is very user friendly, so that any planning applicant could use it by themselves and create an energy statement to submit to their local authority with their planning application. The cost of doing this is just £36 and so will save £100’s in consultancy fees for the planning applicant where the local authority requires an energy statement. Equally the local authority have a standard template for energy statements and can access data input into Enplanner by the planning applicant, thus making the process of meeting the onsite renewable energy generation requirements much more efficient (in terms of time and money) and transparent for all involved. Enplanner.com always encourages user feedback with the ever visible ‘feedback’ tab. If users have any problems with the toolkit Encraft endeavour to resolve the issues as soon as possible. As with any online software, Enplanner runs best and fastest on the newer web browers, for example, IE8+, Chrome, Safari or Firefox. New functionality and databases will be added to the toolkit with the release of new versions throughout 2011 and 2012. Version 2 will be released in September which will include the costs and savings associated with each renewable technologies as well as some case studies and automatic evaluation of the applicant projects database for local authority users.
