How to Map the Road to Net Zero: Local Area Energy Planning in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority
This article forms part of our Data for Policy series. As part of IPPO and UCL’s Department of Information Studies’ Building Local Data Capabilities project, five Data for Policy Fellows are currently embedded in partner local government bodies across the United Kingdom and will write about their experiences and insights on the challenges of using data in policymaking.
Veronica-Nicolle Hera
For Greater Manchester to reach the target of carbon neutrality by 2038, a total investment of £65bn is needed.
Now, one year after the exciting “trailblazer” deeper devolution deal in Greater Manchester, the Combined Authority is looking to assess its 2022 Local Area Energy Plan (LAEP) and decide on next steps to carbon neutrality.
The plans were originally produced with the help of Energy Systems Catapult. They are now being updated to ensure they fully reflect progress towards carbon neutrality goals and offer the right support to policymakers looking to make evidence-informed decisions.
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) Environment Research team is working with its Low Carbon team to lead an organisation-wide redrafting process. They are looking to include perspectives from teams in different directorates, as well as best practice from across the LAEP sector – some which may have already been applied by other combined or local authorities across the UK. The second iteration of the LAEP will be based on an assessment of their first version.
My role will be to conduct a series of interviews with different stakeholders who were either involved in the GMCA’s LAEP development process, have insight into regional or national LAEP practices or are able to shed light on relevant data use, both within and outside the GMCA, and draft an evaluation report.
The discussions will unpack today’s challenges and opportunities in the energy planning sector and complement the second part of the report by presenting an extensive review of available LAEP related tools and datasets.
This project will enable the Combined Authority to take essential next steps in its Net Zero journey, while also demonstrating how a public sector and academic collaboration (between the GMCA, UCL and IPPO) can support in-depth, innovative thinking, and the creation of practical, solution-oriented recommendations.
Local Area Energy Planning
Local area energy planning (LAEP) is a relatively new process that aims to deliver Net Zero targets more effectively at the regional level. Its purpose is to provide an action plan for local areas that also account for action at the national level. The plans incorporates technical evidence on the whole energy system, wider non-technical factors, and engagement with stakeholders.
In 2021, Greater Manchester worked with Energy Systems Catapult to develop such plans for each of its ten districts as well as an overall one for the city region, detailing the current position and a roadmap towards a decarbonised future.
In the coming months, I will be working on an in-depth evaluation report to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
Trailblazer city-regions like Greater Manchester have been some of the first areas in the UK to adopt LAEPs with ambitious pre-2050 Net Zero targets. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this tool is an important step in informing the Combined Authority’s decision-making moving forward.
The Potential of LAEPs
Local Area Energy Planning (LAEP) is a bottom-up, data-driven, whole-system approach to delivering net zero in a particular region. Whole systems planning means all parts of the system are mapped, including energy supply and demand, transport, buildings, local industry and the environment. They widely vary by ambition and scope and may cover the local needs and targets of a city, district, or county council, from local authority (LA) to combined authority (CA) level. Ultimately, a LAEP should outline the most cost-effective way for a local area to decarbonise and set out an action plan for implementation.
Since creating a LAEP is not a statutory requirement in the UK, participation is voluntary and usually done in conjunction with innovation funding from publicly funded bodies. Thus, while 104 out of 327 UK LAs or CAs have set more ambitious net zero emissions targets than the national government, a third of them have not yet published any form of climate action plan, and as of 2022, only 20 LA LAEPs have been developed.
Several of the already-existing LAEPs have been produced in partnership with external organisations offering their technical expertise, such as Energy Systems Catapult, Regen or the Centre for Sustainable Energy. Given the broad range of methodologies used and differences between the final plans, the first task of the project will be to undertake a comprehensive review of the UK LAEP landscape, by looking comparatively at the work done by various CAs and LAs to understand how it can inform Greater Manchester’s case.
Bringing the Plans to Life with Data
While the GMCA’s LAEP is an important step forward in the transition to Net Zero, currently, the format only presents a snapshot in time. Making use of evolving available data to capture progress as well as the large-scale context, is essential to gauging the resources needed to tackle upcoming challenges and adjust accordingly.
With the dynamic nature of an LAEP in mind, we will aim to fill in the gap between understanding the data needs of various stakeholders and identifying what available datasets would be most useful to achieve set goals.
Together with Principal GMCA Researcher Rachel Berman, Jeremy Williams from IPPO and Dr Bonnie Buyuklieva from UCL’s Department of Information Studies, we will provide an in-depth understanding of the UK data-policy landscape and the GMCA’s position within it, while generating local-level knowledge through stakeholder engagement – both at the LA and the CA level – and identify the best way to plan and achieve Net Zero targets.
Short-term Changes, Long-Term Impact
A LAEP should outline the most cost-effective way for a local area to decarbonise and set out an action plan for implementation. Central to this planning process is ensuring the postitive impact and long-term term benefits changes will bring to local residents. The current LAEP projects set out a considerable level of ambition for the coming years, including the retrofit of 140,000 homes, and instalment of 116,00 heat pumps and 2 GW of rooftop PV across houses, as well connecting 8000 homes to heat networks and incentivising the purchase of 190,000 electric vehicles in the next 5 years.
These challenging short-term changes need to lower costs for energy consumers and offer higher efficiency to energy providers in the long term.
To ensure progress towards these targets, it is important to map the available resources and understand the system-level changes necessary to anticipate uptake and provision issues. My work will aim to uncover not only how the GMCA can get the largest benefits from a carbon neutrality perspective, but also ensure these benefits are passed on through different levels of government, down to the individual level, in a fair and equitable manner.
Sharing Data Solutions: Challenges and Opportunities
The first step of this project will be understanding the scope and scale of the GMCA LAEP and what data-driven solutions could be used to deliver implementation. To address this based on the place-based approach the GMCA district-level LAEPs took, the evaluation report will include interviews with LA and CA-level stakeholders, aiming to draw on local-level knowledge of the data challenges policymakers face and identify practical tools to address them.
The broader challenge is to enable better communication between different levels of government. By inviting the participation of various stakeholders across the GMCA, this LAEP evaluation aim to smoother the transition to Net Zero, and also set a precedent of collaboration and shared learning between different data teams, that can have a positive impact across the CA.
Based on the relevant overlap and connections, I will be working closely with other Data in Policy Fellows to foster useful information exchanges and potential cross-partner collaborations.
The GMCA is not the only Combined Authority grappling with the challenges and opportunities that LAEPs provide in the context of working collaboratively with its ten constituent LAs. Within the Building Local Data Capabilities project, two other partners – the Greater London Authority and the West Midlands Combined Authority – operate similar structures and may be able to provide important insights grounded in their respective LAEP journeys.
Initial insights and the way moving forward
While Greater Manchester’s goal of achieving Net Zero by 2038 is not an easy one, there is no better time to progress this. With the higher degree of autonomy from its deeper devolution deal, the CA is perfectly placed to explore the evolving LAEP landscape of tools and providers, and refresh its plans based on the latest data to ensure it accurately reflects the current situation and tracks the progress achieved so far.
Learning from past LAEP iterations and other CAs will be an essential step in this process, as my intuition is that many of the previously encountered difficulties will be similar across regions. And when it comes to data-driven solutions, shared learning is especially important – if a CA is using a particular tool or dataset to address a common problem, this may be easily replicated or implemented in Greater Manchester.
Veronica-Nicolle Hera is a Data in Policy Fellow at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) hosted through the Dept of Information Studies, UCL and International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO). With experience in data analysis based on her PhD at the University of Cambridge and previous role as a Research Assistant at UCL, Veronica has a strong foundation in quantitative methods applied to the study of trust in government and political participation across countries. In her fellowship, Veronica will be working on an evaluation of the GMCA’s Local Area Energy Planning.
References
Collins, A., & Walker, A. (2023). Local area energy planning: achieving net zero locally. UK Parliament POST. https://doi.org/10.58248/PN703
GMCA. (2019). 5-Year Environment Plan for Greater Manchester 2019-2024. https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/1986/5-year-plan-branded_3.pdf
GMCA. (2024). Local Energy Market – GM Green City. https://gmgreencity.com/projects-and-campaigns/local-energy-market/
Line, J., & Walters, B. (2022). Greater Manchester Local Area Energy Planning: Overview and Insight – GM Green City. https://gmgreencity.com/resource_library/greater-manchester-local-area-energy-planning-overview-and-insight/