Tag: carbon

• Renewable energy fiddle backfires for National Highways

  National Highways’ corporate carbon emissions increased by nearly a fifth over the last year, while emissions from construction and maintenance fell and road user emissions did not fall anything like fast enough to achieve a target of a 55% cut by 2030.

  The company has published an annual update to its Net zero highways 2030 / 2040 / 2050 plan, which sets those three dates as targets for net zero corporate emissions, construction and maintenance emissions and road user emissions respectively.

  Under the plan, progress towards the corporate emissions target gets a large boost from move to “certified renewable electricity”, which means that such electricity does not count towards the company’s target consumption. This is expected to reduce the company’s own emissions by 51% against a 2017-18 baseline but it is not allowed to use this method for its corporate reporting of its emissions, i.e. its annual report, or its KPI target for RIS 2, which it missed.

  

  Unfortunately, during 2024-25 corporate emissions rose by 18% from 38,388 tCO2e to 45,241 tCO2e. The company said this was largely due to two factors: one motorway service operator ceasing to claim renewable energy certificates, and a data improvement exercise linked to a recalculation of corporate carbon emissions to achieve Science Based Targets Initiative verification.

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  2025.09.16

• Unpicking National Highways’ environmental record

  The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance: end of the second road period April 2020 to March 2025 has details of the company’s performance against KPIs on environmental issues and it’s a bio-diverse picture to say the least.

  Cutting corporate carbon emissions is one KPI where the company has failed and failed badly; it’s also a measure where I have been tracking the moving of the goalposts for sometime, and have indeed contributed to the moving of the goalposts.

  In 2023 I reported that the company was claiming to have a mechanism for reporting against its target of a 75% cut against a 2017-18 baseline that amounted to a one-way bet. The expected cut was mainly because the expected decarbonisation of electricity from the grid.

  National Highways claimed to have reached a backroom deal with the government whereby its emissions were based on forecasts of the carbon intensity of electricity, even if they had been proved wrong.

  This was news to the government and a few months later it announced that the calculation methodology would remain based on actual emissions, but the target would be reduced to a 67% cut. It said this wouldn’t make the easier to achieve, which was an interesting spin to say the least.

  The latest ORR report notes that last year the government reduced the target again – to 56%. But…

  At the end of RP2, National Highways achieved a 51% reduction in its corporate carbon emissions compared to the baseline. Therefore, the company did not meet this KPI target of a 56% reduction for the road period.

  And the ORR notes that it challenged National Highways to speed up its move to LED lighting but it refused. So it ended up with a 51% cut against an original target of 75%.

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  2025.07.18