Shift to Net Zero

Shift to Net Zero builds on work undertaken by ep group, Ibex Earth and three local authority (LAs) partners (Essex County Council, Surrey County Council and Brighton & Hove City Council) between April and November 2022\. The work was sponsored by the Greater South East Net Zero Hub (GSEHub) and explored how a regional approach that spanned multiple LAs could be used to support LAs based outside large cities and devolved areas to deliver and finance their net zero programmes.

Our research identified a (conservative) capital requirement of £35 billion for net zero and climate projects - ranging from energy efficiency investments across public sector housing; decarbonising a LA civic estate; delivering large-scale renewable generation projects; and deploying district heating networks - up to 2030 across Essex, Surrey and Brighton.

Work also demonstrated that non-technical factors (lack of in-house skills, resources, capacity, access to finance) are most prominent for LAs that are not large cities or devolved areas. In short, current practices by smaller LAs (county, borough, district, unitary etc) are preventing them from achieving their net zero targets locally. They do not have access to funding to deliver large-scale projects and often adopt a fragmented approach that have high delivery costs attached to them.

Our solution is a new Net Zero Delivery Vehicle (NZDV) that is developed, designed and operationilised through a private / public partnership, which includes the partners involved in the GSEHub listed above and Kent County Council. The NZDV enables LAs to shift their approach to net zero, using new frameworks, de-risking investments, building in-house capacity and resources to access private capital to accelerate the pace and scale of net zero programmes, and identifying opportunities to maximise social, economic and environmental benefits locally.

The focus of the NZDV is to deploy a place-based solution across the following 6 net zero investment classes: * domestic building decarbonisation * non-domestic building decarbonisation * renewable energy generation * transport decarbonisation * waste management * green infrastructure

The feasibility study will enable project partners to coordinate action across the public and private sectors to better understand, design and develop the frameworks that are required for the successful deployment of the NZDV in Phase 2 (including the scale at which the NZDV will need to operate across different geographic locations to attract private capital and determine the various mechanisms that need to be in place to deliver net zero projects across different net zero investment classes).