Data Store

energy for london’s datastore provides links to the latest data sets relevant to London (and other regions in most instances) on issues such as energy generation and demand, carbon emissions, housing energy efficiency data, fuel poverty indicators etc.

4MW of PV added in London

March 2013: Ofgem’s new FIT quarterly report provides an update on the take-up of Feed in Tariff eligible technologies across the UK. London (as at 31 December 2012) has a total of 39.38 MW of FIT renewable capacity installed – as with the rest of the country, the vast proportion of this capacity is made up of PV (99% in London).  This is an increase of 4.25 MW of capacity over the previous quarter.

Progress remains slow in London which  – with the North East – trails all other UK regions by a significant margin. See graph from FIT report below highlighting the number of installations by region.

Previous posts discuss London’s slow performance on FIT take up here.

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London Ward Profiles

March 2013: Available at London Datastore: “The ward profiles and ward atlas provide a range of demographic and related data for each ward in Greater London. They are designed to provide an overview of the population in these small areas by presenting a range of data on the population, diversity, households, life expectancy, housing, crime, benefits, land use, deprivation, and employment.”

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London SME retrofit programme details

15 March 2013: Details have been released that funding has been approved by the Mayor for a energy efficiency  programme targeted at London’s  small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The approval form sets out that “up to £21,000 will be allocated to commission work to deliver energy efficiency retrofit services. The project seeks to develop SME engagement, improve knowledge of the SME retrofit landscape, and establish suitable financial and delivery models using learning gained from the RE:FIT and RE:NEW programmes, with work to be completed by end-March 2013”.

The Mayor’s 2011 energy strategy set out findings that:

  • small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are reluctant to take action on installing energy efficiency measures and low and zero-carbon microgeneration technologies without seeing that government is taking action on it first (see para 2 or research here)
  • There are currently over 830,000 SMEs in the capital and collectively SMEs emit 20 per cent of the UK’s total CO2 emissions. Due to their size, SMEs  often do not have sufficient resources and expertise to allocate to energy management, and therefore require support and advice to reduce their energy use.
  • However, it is also often hard to reach SMEs and much of the support or drivers through legislation and other programmes are geared towards large organisations (SME data can be found here and here)

And set out the following action:

  • Action 8.5 – The Mayor will support SMEs to reduce their energy use by working with partners and using his programmes to signpost SMEs to existing sources of energy efficiency support. The Mayor will also review the provision of energy efficiency support to SMEs in London, identifying areas where further action is required, and developing support in areas where the Mayor can contribute to its quality, availability and accessibility.

The approval form concludes:

“This work would directly feed into a paper submitted to the Housing Investment Group for approval of GLA funding and resources to deliver pilot projects in 2013-14, and develop a pan-London SME programme. It is currently anticipated that procurement for the full programme would be commenced from 2014, with a full roll-out from 2015 onwards.”

Hence any pan-London programme would, if approved, fully start under a new Mayor after the next London election.

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Electricity Consumption per London Borough

February 2013: London Datastore has posted a cut-down version of DECC’s latest statistics of electricity consumption by local authority providing just the London boroughs detail (use the Excel link provided on the London Datastore webpage). A timeseries of data from 2003-2011 is made available and includes electricity consumption (GWh) per borough for domestic customers and I&C (industrial and commercial) consumers. The table also provides the number of MPANs (Meter Point Administration Number) per borough per domestic/I&C sector. For more on MPANs see the following entry on Wikipedia …and for still more see the following factsheet on Elexon’s website.

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Waltham Forest continues to lead on PV

January 2013: DECC have released their latest quarterly dataset of “Sub-regional statistics show [ing] the number of installations and total installed capacity by technology type at the end the latest quarter that have been confirmed on the Central FIT Register (CFR)”. [DECC weblink;  Excel file] The data provides a useful breakdown of installations under the Feed in Tariff (FIT) programme by ‘local authorities’ and also ‘parliamentary constituency’. The top 10  London boroughs by total installs of PV (photovoltaic) installations under the FITs programme (which started in April 2010) is provided below.

Waltham Forest 861
Bromley 730
Croydon 577
Havering 491
Bexley 404
Richmond upon Thames 397
Barnet 394
Ealing 383
Redbridge 336
Lewisham 315

Points to note:

  • Waltham Forest continues to be the local authority with the most number of total PV installs
  • By comparing the latest dataset to the previous October 2012 dataset, it can also be seen that Waltham Forest had the highest number of PV installs over the past quarter (136) – 3-4 times as much as the next nearest boroughs (Bromley (49), Croydon (33) and Havering (32)
  • Over the last three quarters London has seen a small drop in its percentage of total PV installs as a proportion of the UK total – from 2.79% to 2.76%
  • Further comparison of PVs in London compared to other UK regions can be seen here.
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New Energy Centre for Energy Epidemiology

January 2013: University College London announced that it has been awarded funding to establish the UCL-Energy Centre for Energy Epidemiology which “will focus on providing an evidence base for government and industry to support end use energy reduction across buildings and transport, helping to deliver the UK’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.”  ‘Energy Epidemiology – it says here –  is apparently “the systematic use of measured data to illuminate the causes of energy use and of changes in energy use.  The approach has a long history in health research, but has not so far been applied, at scale, to the study of energy.” So now you know!

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London energy data maps

January 2013: Tim Starley Grainger has posted some useful graphics on how London is faring under some key Government energy efficiency and renewable energy programmes, such as CERT, Warm Front and progress under the Feed in Tariffs (FITs). As highlighted in various posts on this site, it doesn’t make for cheerful viewing. Graphics posted here.

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The Electric City

December 2012: Following last week’s LSE Cities ‘Electric City’ conference which took place at the fascinating ‘Former Shoreditch Electricity Generating Station & Refuse Destructor’ some material have been posted online.

  • A series of essays on the theme Electric City have been brought together in a publication for the conference which can be downloaded here. There’s not much specifically on London’s energy challenges, but the Global Problems: City Solutions contribution highlights an interesting point suggesting that “According to some reports, urban regions already produce ten times more renewable technologies patents than rural regions.”
  • A selection of video interviews from the conference are posted on Youtube
  • And the Guardian has posted a series of ‘exclusive data visualisations’ from the conference which includes ‘Unpacking London: energy & pollution’ highlighting that “Three quarters of London’s energy consumption is fueled directly by oil and gas, with the vast majority of the remainder generated by fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Just 2.1% comes either direct from waste and renewables or from renewably-generated electricity.”
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Waltham Forest has highest number of PV installations of any London borough

24 October 2012: A recent post provided some regional detail of the uptake of Feed in Tariff (FITs) generators – predominantly photovoltaics (PVs) – across the UK (at the English regions and devolved administrations level). DECC have today released an updated spreadsheet providing a breakdown on the number of installations at local authority and parliamentary constituency level. This highlights that:

  • London’s suburbs do the best in relation to PVs installed with Waltham Forest  having the highest number of installs of all London boroughs (701); then Bromley (666), Croydon (525)  and Havering (440).
  • The parliamentary constituency of Walthamstow has accordingly the highest number of PV installations of any constituency in London (373). [For context, Tiverton in Devon has the highest number of installations of any UK constituency – 2,456]
  • Unfortunately installed capacity (ie kWe of generation) by local authority/constituency is not available – which would be a more helpful metric (it is included available on a per installation basis in Ofgem’s comprehensive FIT spreadsheet (370k+ entries) – the latest of which was published a few weeks ago – and which Energy for London is currently going through and will report on shortly).
  • A not very helpful map is also provided by DECC today of Number of domestic photovoltaic installations by Local Authority, as at end of September 2012

In addition to the direct link here the spreadsheet can also be downloaded from the following DECC FITs webpage (the file is called ‘Sub-regional Feed-in Tariffs confirmed on the CFR statistics‘).

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Carbon Visualisation

October 2012: A previous post highlighted how a campaign by the excellent Centre for Sustainable Energy managed to secure the release of a 40,000 dataset of public sector buildings Display Energy Certificates (DECs).

CSE have recently highlighted how this data has been used by a company called Carbon Visuals.


Some of the London building carbon data is illustrated above.

Carbon Visuals explain:
“With a grant from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board we have been exploring real-time visualisation and the visualisation of large data-sets. One of the results is an interactive visualisation of the carbon footprint of every public building in England and Wales – 40 thousand of them!
http://uk-energy-ratings.carbonvisuals.com/ The visualisation works in any browser that can run the Google Earth plugin but because the dataset is large, the plugin may perform sluggishly on slow computers. Or open in desktop version of Google Earth: http://uk-energy-ratings.carbonvisuals.com/kml/uk-emissions.kml

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Statistics on new housing starts and completions in each local authority in London

September 2012: Recent parliamentary question in the House of Commons provides a useful summary on where London housing statistics are kept and collated.

Statistics on new housing starts and completions in each local authority in London, taken from the National Statistics on House Building, are published in live table 253 on the Department for Communities and Local Government’s website which is available on the following link.

These statistics show starts and completions split by tenure according to whether the organisation responsible for the development is a private company, a housing association or a local authority. The figures for housing associations and local authorities can together be used as a proxy for affordable housing starts and completions. However, these figures may underestimate affordable housing supply and overestimate private housing, as they are from building control records in which the ultimate tenure may be difficult to identify.

Statistics on the full extent of affordable housing supply by local authority are published in the Department’s live tables 1006, 1007 and 1008, which are available at the following link.

From 1 April 2012, the Mayor of London has had oversight of strategic housing, regeneration and economic development in London.

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Greenhouse Gas summary reports

15 June 2012: DECC have issued a series of useful summary documents on greenhouse emissions related to key sectors:

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