December 2013: An oral evidence session between officials and the London Assembly Budget & Performance Committee (see earlier post for details) highlighted the slow progress of the Mayor’s domestic energy efficiency retrofit programme RE:NEW. A new paper (06a(v)) presented to the 18th December meeting of the London Assembly Budget Monitoring Sub-Committee provides some data helping illustrate the extent of the shortfall.
The current forecast for 13/14 (right hand chart) shows that RE:NEW is predicted to just miss the project target – however, the performance level to date indicated shows that even this reduced level of delivery is still some way off. The oral evidence session (referred to above) in fact suggests that only 3% of the 13/14 target has as yet been achieved (996 tonnes of CO2 compared to a target of 29,416 – earlier post). Paper 06a(v) provides some explanation for the slow progress:
- Delivery of the RE:NEW Phase II carbon targets is significantly delayed and contractors will miss their obligations. This is largely due to delays in availability of ECO (government subsidy). Delivery of the carbon savings from the interim Support Team has exceeded targets for quarter two
- Performance payments have been withheld from contractors and the funding is being reallocated to the RE:NEW Support Team in order to reduce the shortfall in performance. However, this is not sufficient to completely mitigate the lower savings from RE:NEW Phase II and this, combined with a delay in confirmation from the European Investment Bank for ELENA funding prior to commencing procurement of the full RE:NEW Support Team, means its is forecast 75 per cent of 2013/14 carbon targets will be achieved.
- The targets for future years have been reviewed and updated in light of the above and as planned. They have been reduced for 2014/15 and 2015/16, but an additional year of delivery (2016/17) has been added, which leads to an increase in carbon savings overall – albeit over a longer period.
The paper goes on to report latest CO2 saving estimates of two further Mayor’s climate change projects – RE:FIT (the public sector building retrofit project) and the London decentralised energy programme. The latter states that “Significant progress has been made on several projects, particularly with regards the Lea Valley Heat Network, Lakeside Energy from Waste, Greenwich Power Station and the Kew Gardens Decentralised Energy scheme.“