Low carbon infrastructure

£20.96m capital funding has been made available from the Treasury housing stimulus package for low carbon infrastructure exemplars in the Growth Points and Growth Areas, to reduce carbon emissions from housing.

This funding was announced as part of the 2009 Budget ‘Building Britain’s Future’

The budget refers to existing policies enabling £50 billion of low-carbon investment over the three years to 2011.  Budget 2009 provided over £1.4 billion of extra targeted support in the low-carbon sector. It states that together with announcements made in the autumn 2008, measures announced will enable an additional £10.4 billion of low carbon sector and energy investment over three years.

Small scale renewable and community energy

Within this the budget included £70 million for decentralised small-scale and community low-carbon energy made up of:

  • £25 million in funding for low carbon community heating schemes, allowing at least 10 communities to benefit from cleaner, locally produced energy. Of this £21.96m will be made available to the HCA to deliver low carbon project in Growth Areas and Growth Points.
  • £45 million for small scale renewable electricity and heat technologies delivered primarily through Low Carbon Buildings Programme. This will help to bring forward around 13,000 installations and prepare the renewable supply chain to benefit from future opportunities when feed-in tariffs and the renewable heat incentive are introduced in 2010 and 2011 respectively

The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan

The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan plots out how the UK will meet the cut in emissions set out in the budget of 34% on 1990 levels by 2020. A 21% reduction has already been delivered – equivalent to cutting emissions entirely from four cities the size of London.

Transforming the country into a cleaner, greener and more prosperous place to live is at the heart of our economic plans for Building Britain’s Future and ensuring the UK is ready to take advantage of the opportunities ahead.

By 2020:

  • More than 1.2 million people will be in green jobs
  • 7 million homes will have benefited from whole house makeovers, and more than 1.5 million households will be supported to produce their own clean energy
  • Around 40% of electricity will be from low carbon sources, from renewables, nuclear and clean coal
  • We will be importing half the amount of gas that we otherwise would
  • The average new car will emit 40% less carbon than now. 

The Transition Plan is the most systematic response to climate change of any major developed economy, and sets the standard for others in the run up to crucial global climate talks in Copenhagen in December. 

Progress to date

Post budget announcement the HCA in May 09 invited Growth Areas and Growth Points to bring forward community heating projects, which would deliver an exemplary low carbon community heating solution to new and existing development. Following the submission of expressions of interest in June 09 a rigorous competition process was run, which involved external peer review by a prestigious Sounding Board (listed below) and internal business plan appraisal, deliverability assessment and due diligence checks.

The Sounding Board members are:

  • Representatives from HCA
  • Representatives from CLG
  • Energy Saving Trust
  • AECOM
  • Zero Carbon Hub 
  • Independent advisor – Michael King, CHP Association
  • Department of Energy and Climate Change

Projects were assessed against the following criteria:

  • Exemplar status – for instance, size of scheme, support to new and existing homes, technologies deployed
  • Affordable heat and power – provisions to protect the fuel poor
  • Fuel diversity – use of renewables or extending the efficiency of fossil fuels
  • Readiness – ability to allocate and spend the fund by March 2010
  • Leverage – commitment of funding or assets from other project partners.

Main justifications for supporting low carbon heating infrastructure with grant aid support is:

  • The majority of these sites are part of phased developments and if we do not take advantage now of putting in the low carbon infrastructure then these schemes will go ahead as standard housing ( eg condensing gas boilers)  
  • Furthermore the costs of achieving higher levels of the Code for Sustainable Homes later into the schemes will be considerably if not prohibitively expensive in future years, if we do address the infrastructure opportunities whilst the schemes still have a large number of new homes to make the total investment viable.
  • Many of these schemes have stalled due to uncertainty in the business model of the developers – the HCA have evidence that if we can help to de-risk sites by supporting the costs of infrastructure, and importantly with HCA also front load the grant contribution for the affordable housing, then developers are managing to convince their Boards and the banks that they can proceed ie this money will help to bring forward schemes which are currently stalled and deliver low carbon outcomes  

Contact details

Bruce Collinson
Housing Growth Delivery Team
New Ventures and Partnerships.
Email: bruce.collinson@hca.gsx.gov.uk 
Tel: 0207 881 1635 

Last updated: 7 September 2009

See also

Email newsletter