One man – one city – one vision. Showing the way.

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In May 2007, the Mayor of London laid down a gauntlet. To cut the city's carbon emissions by 60% by 2025 - 25 years ahead of the UK's national target and 25 years ahead of anywhere else in the world. So can a city do what a nation can't?

Adapted from a story featured on ABC1 Catalyst Show.

London has faced many challenges in its long and colourful history, but this could be its biggest. Like all great cities, it has an insatiable hunger for power. 75% of the worlds’ carbon emissions come from cities. And yet cities are some of the places most at risk from climate change.

That’s because the majority, like London, were built long ago on rivers or tidal plains. Britain has seen incredible things that fifteen years ago they weren’t seeing. They’ve had biblical floods - the middle of England far from the sea, deep under water.

While London missed the worst of the 2007 floods, the tidal Thames has delivered plenty of warnings in recent times. Warnings that weigh heavily on engineer Allan Jones - London’s powerful new Climate Change Agency boss.

The Thames Barrier was designed for a one in 100 year event and it needs to be raised more frequently each year to protect London from flooding. If the trend continues as forecast, the barriers won’t hold out much longer than 2030 and London will be under water.

Stopping the City drowning is an unenviable responsibility and it has fallen on the shoulders of a man called Allan Jones, MBE because of the extraordinary thing he did in the English town of Woking. He set the town on the path to independence of the national electricity grid, by generating all its own power.

Now, Allan has been asked to repeat what he did for Woking in Greater London - a city 75 times the size.

Unusually, Allan became convinced of global warming as early as the 80’s. So when he took a job as an engineer with Woking in 1990, he decided to do something breathtakingly left field…to set Woking on the path to independence of the national electricity grid … by generating all its own power.

An ironically, the council gave its approval for his plan because, simply, they didn’t appreciate how leading edge it was, and Allan didn’t tell them!

As it turned out the audacious plan saved both council and customers money, as the town now sells energy to consumers cheaper than that from the national grid.

So how did he do it? Well, when Allan was asked to update the town’s heating systems, instead he installed a combined heat and power station. It generates electricity, and it recovers the heat from that electricity and then pipes it underground to supply heating and hot water.

Combined heat and power is not new – Manhattan was set up with it in the 1880’s. But when modern, centralised power stations were invented, combined heating and power was quietly abandoned.

In energy terms, though, centralised power stations are far less efficient. Two thirds of the energy produced is thrown away into the atmosphere as heat – with further losses over the grid.

“From their point of view they just generate electricity, throw the heat away, and the gas companies provide gas for people’s boilers so it’s a double whammy. Not only are they throwing energy away they’re using another lot of energy to do something that could have been done from the waste heat. It’s just a complete waste of energy and a primary cause of climate change” said Allan.

Annoyed by what he calls the ‘rubbish’ way things are done, Allan installed 80 combined heat power units in the town, complemented by rows and rows of solar panels.

By 2004, humble Woking was producing 80% of its own energy. And in just 10 years it had dropped its CO2 emissions by a mind-boggling 77%.

This is an incredible achievement and achieved with technology that’s on the shelf now, that’s available now.

And then came the call … and Allan was recruited to do a Woking on London … 75 times Woking’s size.

No other city this size has taken on anything like it. But London has a proud history of transformation under duress.

The goal that’s been set in the Mayor’s climate change action plan is to take twenty five percent of London’s energy supply off the grid and onto decentralised energy by 2025, and more than fifty percent by 2050. This is massive scale decentralised energy.

All new developments in London have a legal obligation to include 20%, decentralised, onsite renewable power. The plan also tackles retrofitting – which you need in a city that is packed with historical treasures.

They have also developed a tri-generation unit with important implications for Australia. It’s a combined heat and power, but with a twist. That is a generator that runs off gas to generate electricity, the heat is then harnessed and captured to heat the building, and that heat is converted into cold water that runs air conditioning.

“The energy industry is full of people who believe grown ups shouldn’t get their energy any other way than big centralised power stations. We have to overcome that mindset” said Allan.

“It’s like an energy revolution. It’s almost like comparing the mobile phone to the landline.

“I hope that London’s call to arms will go down in history as the thing that tips the world into a wider survival reflex.

“If the cities all do the same things as London, that’s how you could tackle climate change. While federal governments are still talking about it, cities can get on and do it” he said.