This is a far-from-ideal workaround from one of the people having difficulties:

I think I’ve found a work around now which came from a related problem someone posted about on unmethours a while back [this one?], so it doesn’t come up if you search for El Capitan.

I think there is probably a much more elegant solution but I am currently running it from the application folder using terminal with some extra steps below:

1) Edited the runenergyplus file to comment out the lines which tell it to delete some files after running (otherwise it runs the first time but not again as it can’t then find the files)

#Delete additional files
#for filename in $LINK_NAMES Energy+.ini eplusout.end;
#do
#  if [ -f $filename ]; then
#    rm $filename
#  fi
#done

2) Set the environment variable before running:

export ENERGYPLUS_DIR=/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0

3) Run the file from terminal specifying the locations:

"/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0/runenergyplus" "/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0/modelrun16010501.idf" “GBR_LONDON_GATWICK_IWEC.epw"

This is all very clumsy and I am sure that a bit more judicious editing of the runenergyplus script would be a better answer but I don’t really have the time or skills to do that and this seems to be working.

As the user says, there must be a better solution than this!