The next mayor of London should set the capital a target of deploying 750MW of solar by 2025, a new report by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) has said.

The ‘London: Global green city’ report has outlined a series of challenges that Boris Johnson’s successor, to be elected next month, will face if the capital is to meet ambitious climate and carbon reduction goals.

Central to achieving these targets will be the establishment of a more stringent decentralised energy strategy, which IPPR said must realise the potential for solar within London’s borders.

The report claims that there is potential for London to deploy as much as 9GW of solar – enough to meet a fifth of its energy demand – but cites Department of Energy and Climate Change figures from December 2015 demonstrating that just 54MW has been installed, equivalent to less than 1% of demand.

IPPR has argued that the next mayor should look to maximise solar deployment across the GLA estate, including the 5,700 acres of land and trackside space belonging to Transport for London, and ensure that mapping tools are made available to assess street-by-street potential for solar, which is then fed into planning decisions.

It has also called for the mayor’s office to work alongside universities and the solar industry to establish new financing models and raised the possibility of local levies.

It draws a parallel with the success seen by New York’s Solar Partnership, in which the City University of New York works alongside the city’s mayor and the New York City Economic Development Corporation to promote self-sustainable solar with the aim of installing 250MW on private buildings by 2025.

Laurie Laybourn-Langton, a research fellow at IPPR and co-author of the report, said that London needed to think of itself as a “global green city”.

“Our report provides a comprehensive programme to ensure the environment is integrated into all policy areas…The green agenda is not an add-on: it should be one of the Mayor’s top priorities,” he added.