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Author Archives: Admin
Energy and Climate Questions to the Mayor
June 2013: This month the Mayor has been asked questions in relation to:
the Mayor’s ability to help resolve the EU-China solar panel import tariffs conflict; savings achieved by householders going through the Mayor’s home energy efficiency programme RE:NEW; the number of Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) provided under RE:NEW; the number of schemes supported by the London Energy Efficiency Fund (LEEF); an update on the Whitehall and Pimlico District Heating Schemes project; the amount of money spent by the GLA from funds awarded by DECC; the number of retrofits delivered by this funding; and the number of jobs delivered; Greenwich Power Station; Transport for London’s energy strategy; discussions with energy suppliers; the impact of future energy price increases on London’s economy; the RE:FIT in Schools initiative; Sutton incinerator; the RE:NEW evaluation report; Green Deal assessments under RE:NEW; flats treated under RE:NEW; fuel poor houses treated under RE:NEW; solid wall households treated under RE:NEW; the number of pensioner households treated under RE:NEW; TfL’s support for biomethane buses; hybrid buses supported by the Green Bus Fund; carbon and the London Enterprise Panel; carbon and the Growing Places Fund; Whitehall District Heating scheme; research undertaken to develop the London Thames Develoment Gateway Network; research into welfare reform and fuel poverty; jobs and the insulation industry; the number of energy efficiency retrofits carried out under funding; the amount of the £5.6m DECC funding provided to the GLA for energy efficiency funding spent.
Previous months questions to the Mayor can be found here.
Posted in News
Tagged Community Heating, ECO, EPCs, Green Deal, RE:FIT, RE:NEW, Transport, Waste
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DECC desire Licence Lite across UK
25 June 2013: DECC Minister Greg Minister, during a Guardian Environment Q&A on local energy earlier today, set out his ambitions on where he’d like the ‘license lite‘ activities, currently being tested by the Greater London Authority (GLA), to go:
Responding to the following question:
“Here is Cornwall we would like to develop the concept of a local energy market (through possibly using the licence lite framework) that builds in community benefit through local ownership, generation and supply. Does this concept fit in with your thoughts about the future of energy markets?”
The Minister replied:
“You bet! I want local energy markets to take off just in the way the local food economy is growing. Just as people shop local, eat seasonal and fresh and look to procure with in a certain distance, so I want people to adopt a local mindset for community scale renewables. Hydro schemes, active coppicing for bio fuels (that can help bring local woodland back into active management – great for flowers & wildlife!) solar on community buildings or brown field sites, community heat neworks based on CHP as well as wind and other technologies all have a place.
“Licence Lite is being pioneered now by the GLA but I want to use that learning to be able to roll this out around the country, to allow a new generation of small scale local power producers to cut through the current complex electricity market regulations and sell direct to customers. Cutting red tape and bureaucracy to let in the electricity entrepreneurs is the future!”
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Green Deal Survey Output
25 June 2013: Ahead of Thursday’s (27th) release from DECC of their first detailed quarterly Green Deal statistics, which should include information on the take-up of Green Deal in London, the department have issued a press release highlighting findings from two Green Deal surveys.
Some findings from the Household Tracker Survey include:
- In Wave 1, which was conducted prior to the official launch of the scheme, awareness stood at 10%. This increased significantly to 19% in Wave 2 and increased further to 22% in the May dip.
- Despite the increase in Quality Mark recognition there was no increase in the level of reassurance offered by it.
- The levels of claimed solid wall insulation and loft insulation were considerably higher than DECC’s own estimates, which are derived from official insulation statistics and robust evidence from the English Household Survey. These discrepancies are important as they suggest that there is a lack of awareness and understanding about different types of energy saving improvements which could affect take up of improvements offered under the Green Deal scheme.
Points of interest from the Green Deal Assessment Survey Report include:
- Paying for an assessment: 85% of respondents said they did not pay for an assessment, with 59% saying the assessor company did not charge a fee and 26% saying it was paid for by a landlord, local authority or other organisation. Eight per cent paid for their assessment in full. [page 10 sets out why so many assessments were at no charge – which is mostly down to incentives being offered by Government earlier this year through the Green Deal Pioneer Places programmes to local authorities]
- Overall, 64% said they would recommend a Green Deal assessment to a friend.
- The data tables for the survey highlight that respondents to the questionnaire comprised 83% ‘Owner occupier’; 5% ‘Private rented’ and 12% ‘Social housing’.
Disappointingly, there doesn’t appear to be any breakdown of responses by region – and hence no data on whether assessments/recognition of the Green Deal are stronger in one part of the country than another, and why this might be happening.
The Mayor’s latest musings on climate change
24 June 2013: The Mayor has turned to the issue of climate prediction in his latest column in the Telegraph. A piece entitled “The weather prophets should be chucked in the deep end“ suggests that “Homeowners lumbered with useless swimming pools know precisely who they should blame”. The piece continues:
“For more than 20 years now, we have been told that this country was going to get hotter and hotter and hotter, and that global warming was going to change our climate in a fundamental way….We were told that Britain was going to have short, wet winters and long, roasting summers.”
“That’s what they said: the BBC, and all the respectable meteorologists – and I reckon there were tens of thousands of people who took these prophecies entirely seriously.”
“They thought they were doing the sensible thing and getting ready for a Californian lifestyle – and they were fools! Fools who believed that the global warming soothsayers really meant what they said or that they had a clue what the weather would be in the next 10 years….and now these so-called weather forecasters and climate change buffs have the unbelievable effrontery to announce that they got it all wrong. They now think that we won’t have 10 years of blistering summer heat; on the contrary, it is apparently going to be 10 years of cold and wet.”
It should be noted that the Mayor has released a comprehensive climate change adaptation plan for London in 2011 which states as a key headline message [p12] that “London has already experienced some changes to its climate and we should expect warmer wetter winters and hotter, drier summers in the future.“
The strategy also goes on to sensibly point out that “There will be years when summers are wetter, or winters are colder than the predicted trend. This does not mean that the climate change projections are wrong, or that efforts to reduce emissions are working, but it underlines the complexity and natural variability of the climate. Adaptation actions must allow for this variability.” [p27]
A previous article (and see here) penned earlier this year by the Mayor, pontificating over the extended winter weather period London had been experiencing, and its possible relationship to sun spots, elicited a number of critical responses, including one from London Assembly Member Jenny Jones, as well as questions being asked in the London Assembly (here and here).
In contrast to Boris’s purple prose today, it’s interesting to see the comments made at the launch of the New York climate change resilience strategy earlier this month by Mayor Bloomberg:
“Citing the perils of climate change and the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday called for a sweeping $19.5 billion initiative that would include new coastal protections and zoning codes for the city as well as new standards for telecommunications and fuel provision.“I strongly believe we have to prepare for what scientists say is a likely scenario””.
The report – A Stronger, More Resilient New York – can be downloaded here.
RAMSES the second (meeting) comes to London
June 2013: On 24-25 June, LSE Cities hosts the second RAMSES project meeting in London, bringing together representatives from all project partners, providing an update of progress on this collaborative project.
RAMSES (Reconciling Adaptation, Mitigation and Sustainable Development for Cities) is a European research project which aims to deliver quantified evidence of the impacts of climate change and the costs and benefits of a wide range of adaptation measures, focusing on cities. LSE is a project partner within a consortium of thirteen public and private research institutions across eight European countries. The project started in October 2012 and will run until 2017.
RAMSES focuses on adaptation measures at the city-scale, as cities are major centres of population and economic activity and places where climate change impacts may be most acutely felt.
The project will use 8 case study cities to quantify the costs and benefits of adaptation measures. It aims to deliver tools to help city policymakers make decisions about prioritising a wide range of adaptation responses. The RAMSES webpage on London can be seen here.
RE:FIT re:viewed
June 2013: As part of a study commissioned by DG Energy into the investment potential for energy efficiency in buildings and of the use of financial instruments at national level, a research report and series of case studies has been prepared. The report ‘Local investments options in Energy Efficiency in the built environment‘ includes reference to the London RE:FIT scheme energy efficiency retrofit scheme targeted at non-domestic public sector buildings. The case studies report provides a detailed outline of the Greater London Authority RE:FIT programme, along with some analysis on how the programmed has fared to date.
Page 9 onwards of the case studies report sets out a ‘RE:FIT project report’
“The delivery framework associated with the RE:FIT programme is a key enabling feature of the programme… RE:FIT allows public sector building owners to procure and implement large scale retrofit programmes up to six times faster than if they were to undertake their own OJEU process for public sector procurement.”
The two concluding parts of the RE:FIT case study section of the report are copied below:
London and the Energy Bill
19 June 2013: Points of interest to London in yesterday’s 6-hour second reading of the Energy Bill in the House of Lords included:
- Lord Teverson’s mention of the GLA’s work on ‘licence lite’ “One of the unsung things in the energy market is licence lite, which is being explored by the Greater London Authority. It is about small independent producers, in particular community schemes, being able to supply directly through local networks to final consumers at a consumer price, thus not needing subsidy for that energy. I would like to explore how that great initiative—unsung by DECC, I think—can be expanded more quickly and effectively throughout the United Kingdom.
As I said earlier, it was 2010 when the initial consultation document was produced. We need now to make sure that this Bill gets through this House, gets through it on time and lands on the statute book, so that those investors, however nervous, can invest.” [col 152] - A useful intervention by The Lord Bishop of London with the following “I echo many of the points already made in this debate, but I shall not repeat them. At the same time, from a London perspective, with our growing population and increasing demand for electricity, which could be as much as 4% a year, I am also clear that the Mayor’s call for a change in the system which currently prevents distribution network operators from installing more capacity in the network without first receiving a formal request for a connection to the system from individual developers, deserves immediate and urgent attention.
In the limited time available, I want to focus on energy demand reduction, which an institution in our position has very much at heart. We have been exploring how to improve our own energy efficiency; there has been some success in my own diocese of London, where over a six-year period we have been able to save about 22% of our energy use. But like others, we need the help of government to achieve the next level. My question to the Minister is: will she undertake to amend Clause 37 to bring forward multiple pilot schemes for incentivising a reduction in energy demand, allowing not only for a capital market pilot but a premium payments pilot and enabling ordinary households as well as big business to be rewarded for demand reduction?” [continues – see col 155 onwards] - DECC’s Minister in the House of Lords Baroness Verma also responded to a question that “He also asked about the feed-in tariffs from five megawatts to 10 megawatts. I am currently looking at that and I hope to have some further details to impart in Committee.” (see here and here and here for more on why this is particularly relevant for London)
London Councils Energy Update
June 2013: The Chair’s report to the London Councils ‘Environment and Transport’ Committee, which took place last week, included the following update on the Big London Energy Switch, and a communication from London Councils to the Secretary of State at DECC on the Energy Bill.
Collective Energy Switching
2. The first auction for the Big London Energy Switch (BLES) was held on 9 April, with the switching provider (iChoosr) negotiating on behalf of about 150,000 residents across the country – the highest number of participants in a UK auction of this kind. The BLES secured 26,436 registrations of which 71% were able to save an average £122 per year.
3. The deadline for residents to decide whether they wanted to take up their offer from the auction was 20 May. Initial indications are that about 7% of those that signed up with the scheme accepted their offer, which is close to the proportions for previous collective switching schemes.
4. There will be another auction on 4 June, for which the BLES is doing low-key promotion rather than proactive engagement as for 9 April. However, we are planning another auction in early autumn with additional engagement targeted at signing up vulnerable residents and those in fuel poverty. This will use the remaining DECC funding (currently estimated at around £100k) and any registration fees from the April and June auctions.
5. We have established regular BLES meetings with iChoosr in the run up to the autumn auction to ensure improved liaison and knowledge-sharing and ultimately resident engagement. Our evaluation partner, the Energy Saving Trust, is beginning its evaluation of the scheme and we will build in learning from this for the autumn auction.
Energy Bill
6. Cllr West wrote to the Energy Secretary, Ed Davey, to highlight issues for boroughs on domestic energy tariffs and energy efficiency relating to the Energy Bill. We are now seeking a meeting with officials at the Department of Energy and Climate Change to discuss these.
7. The Bill itself is due to enter the Lords shortly, after having been considered in the Commons, and we are considering what further lobbying activity may be required.
It’s interesting to see that only 7% – or 1,850 households eventually took up the Big London Energy Switch offer – and – as stated – such a percentage is typical of these collective swtiching schemes. The Chair’s note doesn’t say who the provider selected was: it was Sainsburys. The following blog by iharrow. com highlights that the offer didn’t work for everyone – which is to be expected.
As the Chair’s report notes, an evaluation process is currently being undertaken by the Energy Saving Trust – which will be interesting to see – and the output from that will feed into the next auction to take place sometime in the Autumn.
London Electricity Future Discussions
18 June 2013: In November of last year the Mayor held an Electricity Summit at City Hall where a High Level Electricity Working Group was formed to “discuss the energy systems needed by London over the coming decades and the mechanisms by which the challenges can be met”. A background paper Delivering an Accessible and Competitive Electricity Network for London was presented as well as a presentation setting out the remit of the Working Group.
The papers from the first two High Level Group Meetings have now become available and can be downloaded here (15 January) and here (28 March).
The papers for the 15 January meeting set some comprehensive information of key issues and detail the future priorities of the Group including:
- Identifying growth hotspots and areas of existing network stress that require strategic infrastructure investment
- the Potential of Decentralised Energy systems, district heating and demand side response measures to reduce electricity distribution infrastructure costs
- and Estimating costs of investments required and considering models for how they could be met/shared
The March 28 meeting set out a series of action points including that:
“The GLA and UKPN are establishing a sub- group with respective experts to discuss identified Decentralised Energy and demand side response issue identified at the January meeting. It meets for the first time on 3 May. As and when appropriate, the sub-group will report back to the High-level Working Group.”
The third of the Working Group meetings took place today: Sir Edward Lister is standing down from chairing, and the Mayor’s Environment and Political Advisor Matthew Pencharz will attend the Group meetings from today and chair from henceforth.
See here for the Mayor’s response on how renewable generators issues will be represented on the Group.
Posted in Decentralised Energy, News
Tagged Decentralised Energy, Energy Security, Heat Maps, UK Power Networks
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Brixton Energy Solar 3 is go!
June 2013: Brixton Energy have just sent out an update (copied below) on the launch of their third community-led photovoltaic development, which was attended by Secretary of State for Energy Ed Davey, and Energy Minister Greg Barker (in photo below).
“After months of hard work by the team at Repowering London and Brixton Energy’s committed volunteers, we are delighted to announce the launch of Brixton Energy Solar 3. The solar panels for Brixton Energy Solar 3 will be installed on four buildings on Brixton Hill within the Roupell Park Estate: Hyperion House, Fairview House, Warnham House and the Community Office.
How is Brixton Energy Solar 3 even better?
- We have involved young people from the estate with paid work experience from the very beginning. They have been doing everything from knocking on doors carrying out surveys, to learning about energy efficiency and how to make solar panels. With your support, they will now be installing solar panels on their estate!
- The returns on this project are even higher! We project an annual return of around 4% (in addition to the the 50% tax relief received via SEIS) for Brixton Energy Solar 3, as we will be using more energy onsite. That’s great for Roupell Park too, as more of the buildings will now be powered by clean renewable energy. We will also be generating more money for our unique Community Energy Efficiency Fund.
- More clean electricity! The combined array for Brixton Energy Solar 3 will have 52.5kW installed capacity and is expected to save approximately 22 tonnes of CO2 every year.
- Even more people can now get involved and take ownership of renewable energy. To support this, we have reduced the minimum investment to £50 for residents of the Roupell Park estate.
- It’s now even easier and quickier to purchase your shares! Just go to http://www.repowering.org.uk/projects/roupell-park, fill out your details and you’re done.
So please download the share offer, buy shares in Brixton Energy Solar 3 today and spread the word by forwarding this email to your friends!”
London District Heating Workshop
June 2013: Earlier this month the Greater London Authority (GLA) hosted a workshop that “covered the design principles of secondary heating systems in new developments, to ensure compatibility with existing or planned DH networks across London.” Presentations made on the day are available to view here including talks on the Kings Cross decentralised energy scheme, and on the latest proposals for the development of Battersea Power Station.
The workshop builds on the release earlier this year of the initial version of the GLA’s ‘District Heating Manual for London‘ (link to manual here). The press released issued at the Manual’s launch states that “London is experiencing a significant uplift in decentralised energy schemes with City Hall currently supporting the delivery of schemes valued at more than £300m where the principles of the manual are being applied. This is helping to support a growth in the sector including jobs and infrastructure investment in the capital.
“The manual, the first of its kind in the UK, is designed to be a ‘live’ document that will be updated and feedback is encouraged in time for the next revision to be published this summer.”
Mayor announces 2013 Low Carbon Prize
14 June 2013: The Mayor presented £20,000 to the winners of this year’s Low Carbon Prize, William Hines and Rachel Clemo, both students at UCL. The press release highlights that the winning entry “‘Reseed’, is an idea to remove the need for paper receipts and allow users to access their receipts online using their smartphones. Receipts are costly to produce, easy to lose, and add to consumer waste, so the new system would save money for retailers who would be encouraged to donate a percentage of their savings towards planting more trees. The students receive not only the title of winners of the Mayor’s Low Carbon Prize but the opportunity to turn their idea into a commercial reality with cash and practical support.”
A full list of runners up can be seen here. Many congratulations to the winners William Hines and Rachel Clemo – further information on their initiative can be found at reseed.co.uk.