The government has launched a programme to accelerate promising clean technologies through commercialisation and remove the policy barriers preventing them from reaching the market.
The UK Cleantech Innovation Challenges will focus on a small number of technologies considered critical to meeting carbon budgets and building domestic clean energy industries.
However the initiative is not a new research and development funding programme. It will instead bring companies, investors, academics and public bodies together while using policy and regulation to stimulate demand for emerging technologies.
The first challenge covers carbon management and will focus on reducing costs and scaling point-source carbon capture, direct air capture and other engineered greenhouse gas removal technologies.
Further challenges are being considered for long-duration energy storage, hydrogen, AI-driven grid flexibility and clean heat. Industrial electrification and the new sources of electricity demand it could create are also under review although the government said not every area will result in a formal challenge.
Each challenge will have a time-limited and measurable ambition shaped with industry through a Challenge Coalition. These groups will include technology developers, investors, customers and public sector organisations.
A competitive process will also select high-potential businesses as Innovation Champions. They will receive up to two years of non-financial support including policy engagement, introductions to potential investors and customers and help navigating existing funding programmes.
Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear Lord Vallance said: “Each challenge will bring together government innovators industry and investors behind a clear set of timebound measurable ambitions and coordinate action.”
Government analysis suggests strong innovation could cut cumulative UK energy system costs by between £200 billion and £350 billion from 2025 to 2050 compared with a low-innovation pathway.
The programme aims to concentrate support where innovation could deliver the largest emissions reductions and where UK companies have a potential competitive advantage. It will also target areas that lack similar government initiatives.
The document estimates 25% of the emissions reductions required to reach global net zero depend on technologies that are not yet commercially available.
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