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When London bid to host the 2012 Olympics, it put sustainability at the core of its pitch. Its winning concept, “Towards a One Planet Olympics”, was based on the notion that if the entire world’s population lived a typical British lifestyle people would require the resources of three planets.
It was on the back of this idea that London pledged to stage the greenest games in history. Back in 2005, that pledge loosely translated into making the games carbon neutral.
The ODA has paid more than £1 million as an offset payment to achieve one of its major promises – delivering a 50 per cent cut in carbon footprint. The money, which will go to the mayor of London’s Renew scheme will help pay for low energy lighting and insulation in local schools and housing.
Without this payment, the Olympic bosses will have only achieved around a 40 percent carbon reduction. But the biggest failure has been in the levels of renewable energy on Olympic Park. For years the ODA has promised it would use 20 percent renewable energy on Olympic Park, a target that was clearly dashed when a 120m two megawatt wind turbine that was to power 1000 homes was scrapped last year.
Yesterday the watchdog Commission for Sustainable London revealed the ODA will use just nine percent of renewable energy – and that figure was boosted from a lower number after a decision to install solar panels on the media and broadcast centres.
This has been economically viable from subsidies from government tariffs. However the ability to use other renewable energy was restricted by existing contracts.
“Biomass boilers will be used as part of the energy centre but other renewable heat sources were not able to be used due to the energy centre contract requiring the owners to have exclusive rights to heat the Olympic Park, the commission chair Shaun McCarthy said.
Richard Jackson of the ODA is pretty chagrined about the whole ordeal, and admits that providing renewable energy to the site was a big challenge.
“Beyond the huge sustainability benefits already delivered, we also set ourselves challenging targets on carbon reduction and renewable energy,” Jackson said. “Despite exhaustive efforts we have not been able to find a cost-effective solution to deliver a large percentage of renewable technology on the park.”
Until now, no city has attempted to track all the energy embedded in hosting an Olympics, from the construction materials used to build the Olympic venues, to the transport of athletes and spectators.
So far, London’s scorecard is mixed, according to Shaun McCarthy, chair of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012, the independent body charged with monitoring the environmental impact of the games.
The commission’s latest report praised London’s target to reuse or recycle 90 per cent of construction waste, particularly as more than half the CO2 emissions associated with the games are embodied in the construction process.
The commission has also lauded plans for an on-site combined cooling, heating and power plant, which will be 30 per cent more efficient than a traditional generator. The plant will include biomass boilers and have the capacity to switch from natural gas to other low-carbon and renewable fuel sources.
However, Mr McCarthy says games officials are lagging in the search for alternative biogas energy sources. “There’s a whole range of technologies available that would provide a low or zero carbon source of power, but there’s been confusion over who is accountable,” he says. “I’m getting a bit impatient now. The fact is we first made this recommendation two years ago and it still hasn’t happened.”
He adds that London has the added challenge of living up to a milestone year on the environmental calendar.
Domestically, 2012 is significant because it marks the final year of Britain’s first carbon budget. The budget commits the UK to legally binding emissions cuts, so London’s failure to stage a low-carbon Olympics would prove highly embarrassing. It is also the year the 1997 Kyoto treaty on climate change expires. Provided a successor is agreed, 2012 will usher in a new era of solutions to tackle global warming. The long-anticipated Earth Summit also takes place in 2012.
“It’s an important year for the environment so London has a real opportunity to show the world what Britain is capable of achieving,” says Mr McCarthy. “Our recommendations are a matter of urgency now, because time is short. It would be a travesty if we couldn’t meet our 2012 goals.”
The Olympic Flame will definately be “carbon-neutral”, although EDF, the primary energy provider to the games, says this is a symbolic gesture.
Under its sponsorship agreement, EDF will provide 24MW of energy to the games, all of which will come from renewable sources, such as wind power. To put this figure into perspective, 24MW is only a single megawatt more than is needed to power a single square km of Central London. London, however, does have the highest load density in Europe.
If the Olympics uses less than the agreed amount of energy, EDF will keep half the savings. If the games use more, however, authorities will be subject to “open-book” pricing – the prevailing electricity price on the open market, rather than a previously-agreed rate, which would probably be much lower.
