Strategic Innovation Funding - Round 3

The Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) programme is investing up to £450 million in network innovation over the next 5 years. SIF is positioned to respond to industry obstacles and represents a major investment in the pace of innovation in the sector. SIF is funded by energy consumers through the price cap mechanism.

The vision of the SIF is to

• support Ofgem in facilitating the UK's transition to net zero, at lowest cost to the consumer

*position the UK as the 'Silicon Valley' of energy

Ofgem undertakes a four stage process to foster innovation and tackle issues facing the sector:

• Challenge Setting.
• Ideation.
• Incubation.
• Acceleration.

The ideation phase focuses on enabling the most ambitious and targeted ideas to reach the networks and be pitched as potential solutions for meeting the innovation challenges. These ideas should align with the innovation challenges which have been developed with industry and key stakeholders through the challenge setting process.

The Challenges for this round are:

Challenge 1: Whole system network planning and utilisation to facilitate faster and cheaper network transformation and asset rollout

Challenge 2: Novel technical and market approaches to deliver an equitable and secure net zero power system

Challenge 3: Unlocking energy system flexibility to accelerate electrification of heat

Challenge 4: Enabling power-to-gas (P2G) to provide system flexibility and energy network optimisation

The SIF programme funding opportunities are delivered over different phases:

• Discovery Phase: projects must last up to three months and have a total requested funding of no more than £150,000, exclusive of VAT.
• Alpha Phase: projects must last up to six months and have a total requested funding of no more than £500,000, exclusive of VAT.
• Beta Phase: projects must last up to five years and have a total requested funding of no more than £10 million, exclusive of VAT. Total costs and funding requests of more than this may be considered on a case by case basis.

If you wish to be considered to be included for this work please contact nicola.griffiths@wwutilities for the submission template.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/strategic-innovation-fund-round-three-innovation-challenges