Mayor of London adopts accelerated pathway to net zero

Around one-fifth of capital’s substations will need to be upgraded by 2030 without demand-side response and storage measures, according to Sadiq Khan’s new and more ambitious blueprint to cut the capital’s emissions to net zero.

The London’s mayor’s new carbon reduction pathway, published on Tuesday (18 January), has set a new target to reduce the capital’s emissions to 22% of 1990 levels by 2030, which compares to Khan’s previous goal of 40%.

The government’s UK-wide target is to reduce emissions to one third of 1990 levels by the end of this decade.

The pathway includes a requirement for a nearly 40% reduction in the total heat demand of London’s buildings, entailing insulation upgrades for more than 2 million homes and 250,000 non-domestic buildings.

It also requires 2.2 million operational heat pumps in London, 460,000 buildings connected to district heating networks and a ban on fossil fuel powered cars and vans by 2030.

The Accelerated Green pathway chosen by Khan is one of four scenarios for London’s decarbonisation, which were outlined in a report submitted to the mayor by consultancy Element Energy.

The extent of the electricity grid reinforcement required in the capital will “primarily” depend on the rate of deployment of electric heating and mix of technologies, according to the report.

It said the level of deployment of demand-side response (DSR) and energy storage will also have a “significant” impact on how peak demand for electricity is managed and the scale of grid upgrades required.

Without such flexibility measures, up to 50 of London’s 235 primary substations will need to be reinforced by 2030, a number that will rise to 125 by 2050, Element calculated.

Deployment of DSR measures will reduce the number of primary substation upgrades required by up to eight in 2030 and approximately 25 by 2050, potentially saving up to £1.6 billion worth of investment, the report said.

The mayor’s chosen pathway will require at least £75 billion of public and private investment between now and 2030 in infrastructure and a total of £108 billion by 2050, the Element estimated, including from the utilities.

However, the more ambitious carbon reduction targets will save 150 megatonnes of CO2 emissions by the middle of this century.