London Mayor Boris Johnson is missing out on London’s full solar potential and should establish a new strategy to reverse the trend, according to Green Party London Assembly Member Jenny Jones.
Using the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s database of PV installs approved for the feed-in tariff, the Green Party found that London is now behind Scotland and the North East of England in terms of installed capacity. The city currently has 49MW on the FiT register compared to 451MW in the South West of England.
“Given that solar photovoltaics have the greatest potential of any renewable electricity generating technology, it is astonishing that the Mayor is not promoting and helping London’s residents, businesses, schools, communities to harvest solar electricity from their underused and empty roof tops,” said Jones.
“What Londoners deserve is an enthusiastic advocate of solar energy, a clean energy source that will not only cut our bills and our carbon emissions, but it will help address looming energy supply disruptions. What we don’t need is a Mayor fixed on promoting dirty ‘fracking’ wells around the country and all the inherent environmental hazards associated with them,” she added.
In a new report, Jones recommends the development of a solar strategy for the city and direct support from City Hall to help residents, community groups and businesses to invest.
Jones also suggests using the City’s Licence Lite scheme for small energy producers while selling electricity to Transport for London and other public bodies could help cut risks for producers.
The report also recommends using existing London-based community energy enterprises to help new groups emerge and linking apprentice schemes with solar installation firms.
To help finance the roll out, Jones suggests leveraging the City’s and local authorities’ pension funds with crowd funding and individual investors to help get projects off the ground.