Coventry paves the way for other cities after first year of partnership with E.ON

The UK’s cities and the councils that run them are facing a range of substantial challenges. 

Amid a persistent shortage of homes, what housing stock is available in the UK is for the most part seriously energy inefficient, with the median efficiency score for properties in England standing at a suboptimal 68%. 

At the same time, a crisis in transport and infrastructure is leading to massive road congestion in urban areas, causing higher emissions and poorer air quality. A report from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities has estimated that air pollution may be responsible for between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths a year, and in the years from 2017 to 2025 will have cost the NHS £1.6 billion. 

The whole country is also subject to ongoing challenges around energy security and price spikes made worse by the war in Ukraine and other geopolitical disruptions. These can have a significant impact on the finances of individual households, preventing families from properly heating their homes and even being able to afford quality food. 

All these factors together pose a considerable risk to people’s health, their ability to stay in work and lead happy, purposeful lives, and ultimately to the national economy. 

In cities, local government has more power to address these problems than it did in the past, but also less access to funding. With good intentions, many councils are looking to smart solutions such as AI-driven asset optimisation for answers, but a truly smart solution requires systems thinking: treating cities as the complex organisms they are to find holistic, strategic approaches to their energy problems. 

That's what we are doing in Coventry. 

The case of Coventry 

In 2023, we began a 15-year partnership with Coventry City Council to help them decarbonise all aspects of the city. This allows us to commit time and resources to building a holistic solution tailored to Coventry’s needs instead of working around the edges with small fixes. 

We recently reached the project’s one-year anniversary, and there’s a lot to celebrate. Since last September, we have worked with the council to: 

• Install new EV chargers across the city center, easing the transition to greener transport.
• Pave the way for solar panels on schools and develop plans for a new solar farm on the outskirts of the city.
• Sign a contract to support the decarbonization of four community-serving public buildings, part funded by the Government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS).
• Give families warmer, more comfortable, and cheaper homes with free energy efficiency improvements through the Home Upgrade Grant (HUG) scheme.
• Provide work experience to care leavers, helping them on the way to careers in the sustainable energy industry.
• Develop a Local Energy Masterplan to address key energy challenges and opportunities in the city.

E.ON has already committed €42 billion to the energy transition across Europe, and in the years to come we’ll continue our work to decarbonise Coventry while looking to partner with as many other UK cities as we can. New partnerships and greener cities will bring benefits for individual households, the national economy, and the whole planet, but all of this would be considerably easier with an upgrade to the way we currently make funding for sustainable initiatives available to local governments. 

Making funding accessible for greener cities 

Cities are complex, with many interdependent parts, and no two of them are the same. To succeed in the energy transition, they need more than sporadic interventions and a one-size-fits-all model; they need long-term, holistic planning with help from energy experts. But this isn’t reflected in the way funding is currently made available. 

As it stands, public sector bodies and local authorities wanting to make green interventions draw from a huge array of disparate funding sources that are earmarked for specific purposes such as installing new EV chargers, putting solar panels on a school, or supporting fuel poor homes. Each funding application comes with a range of regulatory and administrative demands that slow the process and make it harder for councils to implement change. 

As in Coventry, we’re able to help cities and councils navigate this to an extent, but the whole journey could be dramatically simplified if the Government was to streamline funding into a single pot dedicated to decarbonisation. The amount that each city could draw would be proportional to its size, and councils could seek expert assistance from energy partners like E.ON to develop comprehensive business cases and invest the money in ways that meet their individual requirements, all with minimal administrative and regulatory demands. The Government is addressing this challenge through devolution of funding to regions as with the Trailblazer Devolution Deal in the West Midland. This will help Coventry access funding to support decarbonisation through a place-based approach that will be shaped and delivered with help from E.ON.

More than 80% of people in the UK live in urban areas, which means that bringing green interventions to cities presents a significant opportunity for improving health outcomes and reaching net zero targets. To take advantage, we want to work with governments both local and national to make sure that funding and expertise are readily available. 

To find out more about our Strategic Energy Partnership with Coventry, go here.