Oldham Green New Deal Delivery Partnership

Oldham Council has identified a crucial barrier to the delivery of Net Zero projects: **the gap between strategic, spatial energy system planning and citizen and community engagement and involvement**. The disconnect between energy system planning tools and municipal planning and engagement processes is leading to missed opportunities and local opposition to Net Zero schemes that could otherwise make progress to carbon reduction targets whilst offering community wealth, resources and employment opportunities.

The Local Area Energy Planning (LAEP) approach enables local authorities to quantify Net Zero projects, but the LAEP methodology takes little account of community needs or priorities in formulating plans. And despite Ofgem's recent Call for Evidence on local energy systems, local authority strategic planning takes little or no account of future energy systems needs and opportunities.

When in rare cases, opportunities are identified by local communities, a lack of partnership working between local authorities, development partners, anchor institutions and the communities themselves hampers their delivery, whilst project opportunities deemed to be 'less viable' than others are left unexploited.

The innovative Oldham Green New Deal Delivery Partnership approach will see the borough-wide roll out of Community-led Energy Planning, an approach that augments and extends LAEP methodology, putting high quality energy system technical expertise in the hands of communities and citizens, to identify new local opportunities and hardwire buy-in from the start.

Our project will bring together strategic energy system planning professionals with local authority statutory planning and engagement to address the disconnect between energy system planning and local authority planning.

Finally, we will integrate Community Led Energy Planning into an Oldham Green New Deal Delivery Partnership (GND-DP), ensuring citizen and community engagement is converted into on the ground projects, and using a Community Wealth Building Approach to bring less-viable Net Zero projects into delivery via innovative Public-Community-Private collaboration.

Overcoming these non-technical barriers will help realise a roster of 18 planned and prospective Net Zero projects, tackling issues across the energy system, and benefitting from £102.5m of investment and saving over 5,000 tCO2/yr.

Using this Phase 1 project, we will author a plan, setting out the deployment of this innovative Net Zero municipal approach in Phase 2\. Through engagement with GMCA, this plan will set out how 'on the ground' unitary council activity can neatly mesh with the strategic set out at a combined authority level.