Financing Net Zero: Investment Barriers Study

***** THIS IS AN AWARD NOTICE, NOT A CALL FOR COMPETITION *****

This procurement is being concluded following a Open Market tender

Brief Description of Requirement

The research is set in the context of the new Financing Net Zero programme (FNZ), which is soon to be launched by Innovate UK. FNZ is a £15m programme with the ambition to accelerate finance in to 'Climate Tech'1

. Interventions are being designed to address the

huge gap between the current scale of climate tech investment and that needed for the UK to meet its decarbonisation and economic goals.

The requirement is to perform a series of rapid studies aligned with 'deep-dive' net zero sectors or technologies. These are:

1. Domestic building retrofit
2. Energy whole systems integration, in particular the use of digital technologies and platforms
3. Circular critical materials, specifically Rare Earth Elements
4. Hydrogen supply chains for distribution and storage.

Focusing on the investment ecosystem and investment challenges in each deep dive area, studies are expected to build on existing information and convene dissemination roundtables to produce the desired research outputs.

The impact of this research is expected to be an improvement in design of FNZ. In particular the activities related to addressing barriers for investors and understanding Innovate UK's role in accelerating net zero finance.

As a pre-study it is also expected to lay foundations for future research, which may deepen the analysis in one of the deep dive sectors, expand in to other sectors, and also look deeper at specific investment challenges that cut across different sectors.