UK Local Authorities and EU renewable energy targets

Yesterday saw the launch of a report from SPRU at University of Sussex and Friends of the Earth entitled Transforming the UK’s Energy System: Policies for the 2020 Renewables Target and Beyond. It consists of a review of where we are now on the path towards meeting the UK’s 2020 renewable energy targets and recommendations of where we need to go to get there.

I’m going to focus on the implications for Local Authorities, but to put that in context the authors’ key recommendations are:

1) Make bolder policy decisions

Stronger central government will be required to step up and make the hard decisions necessary to meet the 2015 target. The coalition has been very strong on cutting budgets, but new policy has been thinner on the ground. This will have to change if we are to meet the targets.

2) Provide more effective financial support

Replace (boldly) or supplement (less boldly) the Renewables Obligation with a feed-in tariff for larger scale renewables, and bring on the Renewable Heat Incentive. These measures would certainly help meet the EU target, although not necessarily delivering the cheapest carbon savings initially.

3) Encourage meso-scale renewables

Meso-scale is the neglected scale between large centralised systems (like nuclear, fossil and large-scale wind electricity) and micro-renewables on a household or building scale. This scale of development needs specific local policies and understanding and I’ll come back to it.

4) Infrastructure

The report mentions an interconnected European grid but focuses on a requirement for increased capacity for the National Grid and for district heat mains. They also talk about the potential for smart grids.

5) Industrial policy

The authors encourage active industrial policy. However they point out the need for monitoring and the power to withdraw support if experience shows that the policy is failing. This makes sense as it is all-too easy for an industry that relies on subsidies to become a powerful lobbying voice, even after it seems that those subsidies will need to remain indefinitely.

The place of Local Authorities

In a press release on the report Tony Bosworth, Senior Climate Campaigner at FoE said:

“Local authorities are key to effectively tackling climate change – and they are best placed to deliver community-scale green electricity schemes that will help us meet renewable energy targets, as well as create jobs and slash fuel bills for people living in the area.”

The report itself suggests that Local Authorities are at the heart of whether the UK will meet its 2020 target. This is certainly the case given the current situation in which the middle tranche of coordination – the Regional Development Agencies – has been stripped away.

I share the authors’ concern at this. There are other more informal arrangements being made to encourage coordinated action across LA boundaries such as the South London Waste Partnership between Merton, Kingston, Sutton and Croydon. This type of initiative is needed if resources and opportunities are not to be wasted simply because they’re in the next District, Borough or County. That is what the RDAs were supposed to be for, a cross-authority planning body for social, economic and environmental benefits.

Working with councils on this sort of thing – developing and assessing the viability of renewable energy and sustainable construction policy really opens your eyes to some of the real people and ideas that will be involved in hitting the 2020 target. One of the key things is the role they have in pointing out opportunities and creating incentives for things like district heating and local CHP. The SPRU/FoE report adapts a table from Foresight (2008) showing the missing sector of region, city, town and neighbourhood scaled policies and incentives. LAs have done a good job on encouraging the micro-renewables, but many have not really pushed for those meso-scales that are required.

There is further room for optimism here as a number of councils have ambitions to create innovative new ways of encouraging developers to build to higher targets, or to deliver financing for community scale renewables through local carbon offset[1].

One other forward-looking approach involved looking at testing financial viability of a target against a fixed proportion of the expected gross development value. This featured in Merton’s LDF consultation document, although in the end the idea was not taken forward[2]. If picked up by other LAs, this idea would allow authorities with a wide range of development values to ask for greater targets on higher-value developments than on lower-value ones. This is a reasonable ask, as the cost of 20% renewables on a 5 bed luxury mansion for example is probably equivalent to one of the bathrooms.

There is a nice paragraph in the report describing the multi-scale approach:

“It is not contradictory to envisage a locality with its own smart ‘micro-grid’ for electricity, taking power from a diverse array of local sources, and for this to be fully connected into a UK national grid and further into an international super-grid. It is quite possible that in 2050 or even sooner someone in Krakow will consume a unit of electricity generated by a solar panel on a school in Bedford.” p.6

From an engineering perspective I like this image of wheels within wheels. It’s not exactly a level of built in redundancy, more like built in resilience. If the lights do go out at a national scale it seems like those communities with the forethought to have pushed the installation meso-scale renewables on local heat and power grids will be in the best possible position to keep on going in something like the way they always have. And wouldn’t you prefer to live in the town without power cuts?

So go on, Local Authorities. Make your District, Borough or County the leader in carbon savings, energy security, and fuel poverty reduction. Make the people who live and work there the most secure in the whole country. The national political will is now in your favour so strike while the iron is hot!

[1] As an aside, the downside of innovative ideas like this is that they create the potential for further confusion (one of the inevitable features of localism) due to the ever-shifting development landscape. A repository of information on local planning policies is starting to look more and more necessary in the face of the localism agenda if developers are not to throw their hands up in despair!

[2] CarbonPlan, one of the companies I work with, was involved in creating a model and evidence base to test this policy and I managed much of the technical work myself. Very sad to see it dropped.