Follow the leader

Eighteen months ago, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone devised a groundbreaking ruling, calling for 10% of the energy requirements of all major new developments to be met from renewable energy generated on-site.

At the same time as Livingstone announced his plans, several of the more dynamic London boroughs introduced similar policies – and now more planning authorities outside London are following suit. What started out with a few proactive planners has become a revolution in the making.

The London Borough of Merton was one of the first local authorities to adopt the 10% ruling in its unitary development plan. It now requires that all new non-residential developments above 1000 m2 “will be expected to provide at least 10% of their predicted energy requirement from renewable energy”.

The London Borough of Croydon has adopted a similar, but more rigorous, stance: in addition to new commercial developments, its policy also applies to conversion schemes and residential developments of 10 or more units.

But it’s not just London’s planning authorities that are calling for renewable energy on new developments. Documents obtained by BSj show that scores of councils nationwide have started to follow London’s lead in championing the use of solar panels, wind turbines and biomass-fired boilers on developments – (see table, right). Among the local authorities adopting, or considering, these prescriptive planning policies are places as far afield as North Devon, Newcastle and Edinburgh. It is expected that most of these local authorities will adopt policies requiring the same 10% renewable energy element for new schemes.

Surprisingly, many of these policies are even more onerous than those adopted by Merton. North Devon, for example, has a 15% renewables requirement on developments of more than 50 houses or commercial developments with a floor area above 1000 m2. And, back in London, Barking and Dagenham has already included a requirement in its unitary development plan for all developments above 2000 m2 “to incorporate renewable energy production equipment to provide at least 20% of predicted energy requirements”. It seems that local planners are driving a national trend.

The Mayor’s Energy Strategy at the Greater London Authority (GLA) sits alongside his earlier London Plan, which was itself a radical change to the planning rules when it was published, with its calls for major new developments to “show how the development would generate a proportion of the site’s electricity or heat from renewables whenever feasible”. Alongside its requirement for planning applications referred to the mayor to follow the 10% rule, the new Strategy also calls for London boroughs “to develop appropriate planning policies to reflect this strategic policy”.

According to Adrian Hewitt, principle environmental officer at the London Borough of Merton, compliance with the mayor’s requirements was helped by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s revised planning policy statement, PPS 22, published last year. This paved the way for local councils to tackle climate change using planning rules.

A policy with a price

All this is, of course, good news for manufacturers of renewable energy technologies. According to Hewitt, Merton’s renewable energy policy will result in an annual £3m spend on environmental technologies. However this is just the tip of the iceberg: as more and more local authorities adopt a similar approach, spending on renewables will increase dramatically. “If 250 of the largest boroughs adopted a renewable energy policy, it would mean the renewables market would be worth over £700m a year,” predicts Hewitt.

While the suppliers of wood-chip boilers and solar water heaters may be anticipating a rosy future, those charged with designing schemes to comply with these demanding policies are less optimistic. Most renewable energy sources are not cheap and to incorporate them cost-effectively into a development is a challenge for any design team.

To address the knowledge gap, the GLA has published the London Renewables Toolkit, developed by consultant Faber Maunsell’s Sustainable Development arm. “It was designed to provide basic support for planning departments and developers who may have little knowledge of building-related renewable energy sources, but need to make decisions about developments,” says Simon Burton, an associate director at Faber Maunsell and the toolkit’s creator (see Capital Idea: BSj 02/05).

Many designers are concerned that planning applications for schemes with a renewables element are reviewed unsympathetically as, because planners are not experts in renewable energy, they don’t fully understand the difficulty of incorporating it cost-effectively. Peter Sutcliffe, Cameron Taylor’s MD, says the biggest challenge for designers right now is speculative buildings. “How do you take 10% off a building’s energy needs when you don’t even know its final use?” he asks. He suggests a solution would be to close the loop between the developers and planner. “The problem is I need certainty, but with the process as it stands things are anything but that,” he states.

Efforts are being made to encourage feedback from planners, says Burton. Faber Maunsell have been commissioned by London Renewables, the body set up to support the mayor’s energy strategy, to develop a new tool to simplify communication of renewable energy proposals. Burton says the project will also provide the industry with examples of the negotiation process, so that engineers can see how planners apply the renewables requirement and the process involved in negotiating an exemption.

“We’re all on a learning curve,” says Chris Twinn, an associate director at consultant Arup. Twinn says that, when confronted with the 10% requirement, the first question a developer will ask is: “what has everybody else delivered?” According to Twinn, the biggest challenge for developers is that they are on their own; a year into the renewables requirement, there are few schemes that have been through planning – and fewer still that have been built.

Design challenge

The requirement to incorporate renewable technology into a scheme cost effectively is not without its challenges for the design team. “Many engineers lack experience of using renewable technologies,” says Twinn. For example, he says that biomass boilers are only cost-effective on large schemes, but engineers without experience of these installations would not know this. “For biomass to be cost-effective, you need to be talking in megawatts. Arup only know that because we’ve been there and done it,” he explains.

A particular difficulty for designers is selecting a resilient renewable energy technology. For many forms of renewables, the supply chain is not yet established. Wood chip fuel, for example, is readily available and a development could be planned to use 5000 m3 of wood chip in, say, five year’s time. However, at the moment the supply chain does not exist to guarantee cost and quantity, which means many developers are reticent to commit to it.

There is talk of the renewables requirement adding 8–10% to the cost of building services. However, this is difficult to substantiate with so few examples of schemes. Maunsell’s Burton says: “It is inevitable that it will add to the cost of a scheme, but this cost will be passed on.” Costs are also difficult to quantify because the 10% requirement is only a suggested upper limit for renewable energy. “The planners would like to see renewable energy contribute more than 10% to a scheme’s energy needs – if they think a scheme can stand more than 10%, they will insist on more being installed,” protests Cameron Taylor’s Sutcliffe. “For the first time, the cost of the building services will have a direct impact on the viability of a scheme,” he says.

In the future, smaller schemes may be exempt from having to install renewables on site. Croydon, for example, are understood to be considering an option similar to a Section 106 agreement for smaller developments. Under 106 agreements, developers negotiate with the planners to provide additional civic amenities to benefit the community as part of their planning application. Under this policy, the developer of a small scheme might be expected to make a significant financial contribution to a local combined heat and power scheme, for example. “You can see the point in banking money communally and then doing something bigger with it,” says Cameron Taylor’s Sutcliffe.

The first projects fully compliant with the 10% renewable energy requirements are currently in planning. In time, most engineers expect such compliance to become the norm – much in the same way that compliance with fire regulations are part and parcel of a design.

However, until such time as planners better understand the impact of the renewables provision, engineers become familiar with renewable technologies and developers fully understand the cost implications of the requirement, there is plenty more work to be done.