Nottingham is squarely on the green cities map with the largest electric bus fleet in Europe, its energy-from-waste policy and solar PV adorning over 4,000 houses. Wishing to capitalise on Nottingham’s experience, the Oxford officials learnt about the key areas where REMOURBAN has been making headway. Oxford City Council plans to retrofit a number of the city’s own homes to 2050 standards and is also looking for solutions to support private housing as most of the building stock is in private hands. Thanks in part to REMOURBAN, the Nottingham team were able share with them their own valuable insights into the challenges encountered and the solutions implemented.
Beyond the technology now available, the two cities discussed some of the governance and management issues in delivering innovation and change. A major point is the need to scale up demand from cities in order to reduce the overall cost of retrofitting the housing stock. There needs to be a rethink on procurement methods which should be output based rather than specification based. And of course cities have to be highly committed to the low carbon agenda and the learning process should be joined up across the cities for impact to be real and long-lasting.
To encapsulate this, the NCC, Oxford City, NTU, NCH , IET and Engiesprong will join forces to draft a White Paper on how cities can learn from the experience to create demand. This will then be vetted and distributed through the IET to the UK government and other cities.
A visit to Oxford by an NCC team will be organised in the near future, a city well acquainted with charging stations.
13 February 2018