Sustainable energy is a core concern worldwide for the foreseeable future. Technologically, its key trends are distributed and renewable energy resources and smart grid capabilities. At the same time, a global need for sustainable energy is meeting increasingly diverse energy policy and economics. To plan with such complex contexts and systems, a novel distributed energy software tool and its initial implementation is presented: the Energy Systems Evaluator Online (ESEO). Its contributions include: (1) A flexible model framework that can simulate current and expected distributed energy systems; (2) An architecture specifying the modular design needed for distributed energy planning software in general; (3) A working implementation as the first general energy planning tool deployed via the Internet with collaborative capabilities.