To transform our energy networks, a ‘Giant Leap Together’ is needed
Manu Ravishankar, Innovation Lead for the Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund programme at Innovate UK, explains how the programme is helping the energy sector bring about the rapid changes needed for net zero.
‘May you live in interesting times…’ Whether or not this is indeed an ancient Chinese curse, it certainly is apt for those working in the energy sector. The pace of change the sector is undergoing, and must continue to undergo to be on the glide path to net zero, is unparalleled.
This transition requires innovation, adoption and deployment at warp speed, and doing this in a coordinated manner will bring exciting opportunities for UK innovators and energy consumers. As JFK almost said, “surely the opening vistas of ̶s̶p̶a̶c̶e̶ net zero promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward”.
To unlock these opportunities, Innovate UK is working with Ofgem to deliver the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), a five-year £450m programme to accelerate the innovation needed to transform energy networks for the future — at lowest cost to consumers.
Beyond funding, innovation for net zero requires the coming together of ideas and capability across not just the energy sector, but in the wider economy. With this in mind, we are launching the ‘Giant Leap Together’, a new sector-wide collaboration model to identify and develop ideas, forge partnerships and exchange the knowledge needed to innovate and commercialise at pace in the energy networks sector.
The process has four main phases and will run on an annual cycle.
1. Developing innovation challenges — December to March
The first step in the process is to identify the innovation challenges that SIF proposals should focus on. They should relate to clear needs and be flexible enough to cover a range of ideas and projects.
The energy innovation landscape is highly dynamic and constantly moulded by geo-politics, market conditions, prevailing policy and regulatory focus and what stage we are at in the net zero transition. Additionally, technology and services in the energy sector move through extensive technical, commercial, social and system integration levels, thus needing different modes of innovation to be deployed successfully.
The SIF team at Innovate UK has undertaken an extensive engagement across sectors spanning academia, industry, government and finance to identify the most relevant and pressing innovation challenges to focus on for this year. Over 16 weeks, hundreds of sector challenges have been considered and prioritised down to four mission-oriented challenges, which are:
- Supporting a just energy transition
- Preparing for a net zero power system
- Improving energy system resilience and robustness
- Accelerating decarbonisation of major energy demands
Each challenge has specific focal areas that the SIF invites projects to address, whilst delivering against these challenge objectives.
As these might need different types of innovation, the SIF is open to novel technical, commercial or social ideas.
2. Ideation — April to June
The second stage is to source and encourage the most ambitious targeted ideas to meet these challenges — whether from the existing energy sector or beyond.
There is great innovation happening outside the energy sector, whether in computer hardware and software, materials science, automotive or many other industries. In order to engage with these sectors effectively and bring ideas in, it is important to translate the energy sector’s needs into workable challenges and opportunities. We must consciously expand our innovation ecosystem to take advantage of these developments and do this in a user (i.e. innovator)- friendly way.
We are collaborating with the Energy Innovation Centre (EIC), Energy Networks Association (ENA) and the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) to run a streamlined ‘call for ideas’ process for innovators in the energy sector and other highly innovative sectors. This process is underpinned by a detailed stakeholder engagement exercise to raise awareness about the SIF, the focal challenges and the innovator user journey. This will allow innovators to submit their project ideas and receive feedback in a quick, easy and transparent manner.
It is important for each innovator to find the correct network partner to develop their idea with. Even though the energy networks are monopolies and carry out broadly similar business activities within power or gas, they all face different challenges linked to geography, consumer segments, infrastructure types and decarbonisation trends in those areas that shape their innovation strategy.
The next step on from idea submission and feedback is a curated pitching event for the innovators to engage the most suitable energy networks for their ideas.
3. Incubation — July to September
The third stage in the process is to build coalitions and partnerships that will break existing silos, work well together, nurture new proposals and innovate effectively.
Moving energy innovation projects to commercial deployment requires more than just the innovators and energy networks to come together. Projects need different skills sets including in data and digitalisation, systems modelling, engineering and commercial assessments and social research.
Additionally, the actors who are important for the innovations to work in the real world and those who are impacted by it need to be involved throughout the innovation journey. This requires partnership and collaboration between organisations that have seldom crossed paths previously and have different perspectives, capabilities and interests.
Each of the focal areas within the SIF innovation challenges has stipulated partnership requirements across the project phases. We will actively help forge these partnerships by facilitating match-making events that bring together energy networks, innovators, and other key enabling stakeholders such as local government, other utilities and relevant consumer groups.
Another key aspect of the SIF is coordinating with other public sector funding programmes to pursue projects which span whole value chains, and which otherwise would not be funded because the funding organisations do not have a wide-ranging or whole-systems remit.
This allows innovation to identify real-world challenges early and accelerates the time required for commercial deployment. We encourage projects receiving funding from other sources to consider the SIF to develop and test the energy networks aspect of their innovation related to the focal challenges.
4 Acceleration — October to November
The fourth stage in the process is when high-quality proposals apply for funding, and the best are given the go-ahead to progress with their projects.
Once the ideas are developed and partnerships are in place, the Round 2 competition for funding will open in September. We will support the project teams to ensure their applications are of high quality and submitted in time for November when the competition closes.
We are also working with the ENA and other partners to launch the first Energy Innovation Summit in September 2022, which builds on the decade-long legacy of the Energy Networks Innovation Conference. The summit will bring together key energy innovation activities and go beyond sharing learnings to help form new partnerships and ideas and ways of working. It will be an action-oriented event to help spawn the activity we need to meet the net zero goals in time.
Come and work with us
The jump we need to make can seem daunting, but if we take this Giant Leap Together, the whole energy sector can go further and faster towards the goal — and make sure the times we live in are ‘interesting’ in the most positive sense.
You can find more information about SIF via the links below and stay updated by signing up to our newsletter and participating in our upcoming events
· Read more about the scope of the innovation challenges
· See the recorded launch briefing for the challenges and the Round 2 competition[PW1]
