Regional Energy Strategy Plan - November 2018

This strategy is a consolidation of more than a year’s work across the West Midlands to bring together existing energy mapping and strategy work, fill in gaps and develop a strategic framework to support delivery of the region’s ambitions and needs. It is intended as a response to BEIS’s request that the three LEPs within the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) produce a single high-level strategy summarising how they will work together through Energy Capital to deliver shared objectives.

Throughout the work we have maintained a fundamental principle that the strategy will not lead to replication or duplication of existing work, initiatives or institutions. The intention is to create a strategy which builds on and supports these activities where they are already underway and makes it easier for local leaders and projects to deliver their specific objectives around energy. This point is expanded on in later sections.

This document should be read as an overview document and strategic framework. It does not attempt detailed energy mapping and street-by-street analysis of housing energy performance across our major conurbations, nor contain maps of energy distribution networks, for example. This is for three reasons: firstly because this would have been very costly and time consuming and potentially prevented us completing this strategy (and carried the risk of losing sight of the wood for the trees); secondly because for a region the size of the West Midlands it would have almost certainly been out-of-date by the time it was finished and impossible to maintain at regional level without considerable ongoing resourcing; and thirdly because most of this data is already held and maintained effectively at local level by different organisations who are typically best placed to maintain the datasets efficiently and cost-effectively. The strategic challenge is not collating the data centrally, it is putting in place effective and strong local partnerships and governance structures to ensure that the data are used and available as effectively and efficiently as needed. This is the approach we are taking in the West Midlands.

Energy Capital itself inherited a strong partnership from the Birmingham Green Commission led by Councillor Lisa Trickett and the work of its energy group, chaired by Professor Martin Freer. The strategy has been made possible by the willingness of this group to combine with the strong sense of purpose coming from the Black Country LEP, where energy is championed by Tom Westley, and the vision of Coventry and Warwickshire, who are engaging creatively with the energy challenge as their traditional core transport and manufacturing businesses see new global opportunities rapidly opening in front of them.

The strategy should be read in conjunction with other key documents produced alongside or as part of the regional energy strategy, specifically:

• Powering Growth: Black Country Energy Strategy Final Report (Aecom, February 2018)

• Business Cases for Energy Innovation Zones in the West Midlands (Arup, March 2018)

• Powering West Midlands Growth: A Regional Approach to Clean Energy Innovation (Regional

  Policy Commission on Energy, March 2018)

• Energy as an Enabler: Linkages between regional energy strategy, productivity and growth

  (Black Country LEP and Matthew Rhodes, March 2018)

• Distributed generation and demand study. Technology growth scenarios to 2030, Regen for WPD (January 2018)

• Several sections of this strategy draw heavily on the work done for these reports and the reports themselves. The work of their authors and the conversations and events surrounding their preparation is much appreciated and recognised. Links to these documents and others relevant to the strategy are provided in appendices I and II and in the References section.

• The project has been governed by a steering group consisting of a representative from each of the three LEPs.