London can become a Zero Carbon city – but only if it follows key recommendations set out in a new follow-up report by the London Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI), a coalition of expert organisations which includes Elementa Consulting (the UK arm of Integral Group) and the UK Green Building Council.

While the LETI initiative has accelerated extensively in less than a year to create an industry-wide movement that has influenced policy within London, the coalition believes that current energy policy relating to carbon emissions in buildings in London will not deliver Net Zero Carbon for new buildings by 2030. Therefore, LETI has published a report outlining altered recommendations to the Draft London Plan – originally published in September 2017 during World Green Building Week – for the Greater London Authority to get London on the right trajectory.

The recommendations outlined in Getting to Zero: The Draft London Plan Consultation Response, published yesterday, revolve around nine key elements in LETI’s vision for London:

1. Operational Zero Carbon’ by 2030 for all new buildings – this moves beyond the current definition of a ‘design prediction’ of partial ‘zero carbon’, to deliver actual operational and measured zero carbon.
2. An absolute kWh metric – to allow the full range of stakeholders involved in the design, operation and delivery of buildings to understand and therefore fully contribute to reducing energy consumption.
3. Adding ‘Be Seen’ to the energy hierarchy – LETI fully supports the inclusion of energy monitoring. This is seen as fundamental to achieving operational zero emissions and thus should be elevated into policy.
4. Energy strategies to demonstrate future-proofing to ‘Operational Zero Carbon’ on-site by 2030 – LETI supports existing clauses in the Draft, but believe leaving it until 2050 will only encourage further lock-in to fossil fuel and urban combustion pollution.
5. Addressing whole life Embodied Carbon to be explicitly included in policy – to drive innovation addressing what will become the largest building carbon emissions challenge once operation carbon is reduced.
6. A zero emissions by 2030 transition plan to be provided for all district heat/energy networks, alongside disclosing energy usage and efficiency data to ensure that networks are part of the solution to delivering operational zero emissions.
7. The heating hierarchy to be renamed and rearranged to emphasis the changing priorities of a trajectory to the zero carbon London.
8. The importance of minimising energy demand peaks to be strengthened
9. Mayor’s Energy Advocates to be available for boroughs to assist in ensuring sustainable design is embedded – as a parallel to the Mayor’s Design Advocates.

For further information on LETI, visit the website: www.LETI.London

Integral Group is a sponsor of WorldGBC’s Advancing Net Zero programme.