GLA

SUMMARY: Ken Livingstone's solar panels for City Hall are nearly ready to switch on. They cost something over half a million pounds, and could reasonably be expected to deliver around 75 MWh a year (not enough for 20 typical houses). For the same money, you could get over 2,000 MWh from a wind turbine, maybe 8,000 MWh from conversion of waste to energy, and yet more carbon-savings if invested into renewable heat or insulation improvements for London houses. Or he could simply have let taxpayers keep their money and make their own decisions about what to do with it. What follows is an examination of whether there are any rational grounds for this sort of wasteful expenditure, or whether this is a classic example of the triumph of style over substance.

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Demos recently published a booklet called The Disrupters, on the subject of low-carbon innovation. There's a lot of nu-speak, and not much consideration of hard economics, but it's not a bad publication - some of the examples cited are genuinely interesting, and some of the lessons taken from their experiences are the right ones. It provides the jumping-off point for this post not because of the publication itself, but because of a picture that they casually used today to promote their podcast on the subject.

It is a picture of City Hall, home of Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Authority, in which solar panels can just be seen being installed. I hadn't realised they were going solar at the GLA, but, photovoltaics (PV) being the least economic of all renewables, I thought I'd look into it a little to see what we could learn from this case.

The most detailed information available comes from the London Climate Change Agency (LCCA), which states that they are installing 70 kW of panels, which will generate "3.1million kWh of renewable electricity over their lifetime". This, they say, "will reduce the CO2 emissions of City Hall by 3,000 tonnes in its lifetime – enough to fill 3,000 hot air balloons". Elsewhere, we find the Authority scaling this down to 1,000 tonnes of CO2-savings over a 20-year lifetime, though still filling 3,000 balloons. 3,000 tonnes is quoted on another site. Let's assume the intended figures are 3,000 tonnes and 20 years. How does that stack up?