The Energy Network Innovation Taskforce (ENIT) has done something the sector has needed for a long time: it has transformed innovation from a collection of loosely connected pilots into five clearly defined, outcome-led missions that the wider ecosystem can align behind.
The shift under RIIO‑3 and the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) is not simply about further funding. As my colleague, Richard Halsey, discussed in the first blog of this series – we’ve helped ENIT shape a new approach to how innovation is conceived, delivered and, critically, scaled.
Having supported innovators to take solutions from early concept through to real-world delivery, we’re well placed to help shape funding proposals, working with businesses to secure support and meet these challenges.
We operate across the full innovation lifecycle: ideation, design, delivery, and scale-up. Our energy system models and real-world trial capabilities allow innovators and network operators to test, validate, and scale solutions which will be needed to achieve the outcomes described across the five challenges.
We’re now going to delve deeper into each of the challenges, looking at how innovators can help deliver each mission.
These five new challenges require networks to deliver measurable customer outcomes and provide businesses with clear signals about the problems that need solving – with a structured pathway to scale innovative technologies and services.
A growing ecosystem of clean tech innovators are already responding. Innovation is evolving beyond individual technologies into integrated solutions that can operate within real-world systems and deliver scalable impact.
One of the most significant pressures facing the energy system today is the ability to connect large-scale demand and generation quickly.
Achieving six-month timelines to connect strategically significant sites is unlikely to be delivered through incremental process improvements alone. It will require fundamental changes to planning processes, new capacity allocation and how existing network capacity is utilised.
Innovators are already addressing key aspects of this challenge.
IONATE’s Hybrid Intelligent Transformer is designed to increase utilisation of existing network assets and defer network reinforcement.
Companies such as Zenobē are helping industrial energy users manage demand more flexibly through integrated energy storage solutions, reducing peak demand and potentially alleviating pressure on constrained networks.
Meanwhile, Ceres Power’s solid oxide technology is supporting the development of flexible hydrogen and distributed power solutions that could help large industrial and commercial sites reduce reliance on traditional grid connections – and improve how energy demand is managed on-site.
The development of new technologies like these, combined with the co-location of assets across multiple energy vectors, can reduce the peak demand on the grid and support faster industrial connections.
The Catapult can help unlock this is coordinated action across planning, regulation, flexibility markets and network operations, as well as technology innovation.
While the headline targets focus on reducing delivery times and costs, the underlying issue is how the entire lifecycle of network projects is managed. Delays are often driven not by construction itself, but by planning, consenting, design and coordination between stakeholders.
Our work with Nick Winser, the Electricity Networks Commissioner, developed a streamlined approach – covering needs identification to commissioning – that’s designed to substantially reduce project timelines from 12-14 years to just seven while maintaining safety.
Emerging digital technologies including AI can also help speed up activities ranging from route planning to project management and stakeholder engagement.
We’re seeing innovators already supporting this transition.
Continuum Industries is automating infrastructure routing and helping reduce the time and complexity of network design. This shows how advanced analytics and asset intelligence solutions can give a clearer picture of the condition of energy assets and network loading.
Delivering faster, lower cost networks is therefore not only about building differently but also organising the system more effectively.
A significant proportion of future maintenance savings will be driven by improved visibility, enabling a shift from reactive to predictive maintenance.
For example, Keen AI applies advanced image analysis and computer vision to spot defects from inspection data, reducing inspection times while accelerating maintenance decision-making.
In parallel, SatVu’s high-resolution thermal satellite imagery helps operators identify overheating equipment and anomalies much earlier than they normally could earlier, helping them prioritise fixes where they deliver the greatest value.
Together, innovations like these reduce unnecessary interventions, shorten power outages, and minimise rework – unlocking cost savings and more reliable networks.
The ambition for plug and play energy devices requires a transition to a more dynamic optimised energy system, where network operators have enhanced visibility of connected devices and those devices can coordinate automatically with network needs through flexibility and optimisation services.
Flexibility benefits the system by shifting demand away from periods of network constraint and towards times when capacity is available. Consumers benefit through lower costs and incentives for participating in these services. We discussed the huge opportunities this presents in our recent latest Innovating to Net Zero report.
Meanwhile, our work with GreenSync on the LCT Connect project showed how digital infrastructure can improve visibility of connected assets while enabling their participation in flexibility services. Using real devices from our Living Lab (more on this below) we explored how enhanced visibility can be achieved for network operators, flexibility service providers and suppliers.
We’re already seeing innovators help turn this vision into reality. Chameleon Technology is enabling households to better understand their real-time energy use in automated control and flexibility services.
Wondrwall coordinates whole-home systems autonomously, creating responsive homes that optimise comfort, cost and energy use.
The challenge, however, is not purely technological. We need to ensure that solutions work for real people, in real homes, and can scale across diverse customer groups.
This is where the Catapult’s Living Lab and Whole Energy Systems Accelerator (WESA) play an important role. Living Lab, which is connected to more than 5,000 real homes, provides a unique environment for understanding how consumers interact with technologies and services in practice, helping ensure that solutions are trusted, usable and inclusive.
The Whole Energy Systems Accelerator (WESA) then enables those solutions to be tested within a wider system context, validating interoperability, coordination and scalability before deployment at scale.
The UK already benefits from one of the most reliable electricity networks in the world. However, a new era of risk, including extreme weather events, geopolitical uncertainty, cyber threats and increasing system complexity, means maintaining exceptionally high levels of reliability may become more challenging.
Addressing this challenge will require increasingly distributed and autonomous systems that can detect, respond and reconfigure in real time helping maintain reliability while minimising costs.
This transition is already being enabled through a combination of technologies and services.
LiNa Energy’s sodium-based batteries can provide resilient backup in constrained or remote locations, supporting continuity where traditional reinforcement may be difficult or uneconomic.
Keep Energy Systems enables the coordination of thermal and mechanical storage at community scale, helping smooth demand during system stress events and reducing the likelihood of customer interruptions.
Exergy3’s high-temperature thermal storage can absorb excess energy and release it when needed, supporting industrial continuity during disruptions and helping protect local economic activity.
Our work on the Power Wheels project, delivered in collaboration with Northern Powergrid, the Centre for Energy Equality, Motability and the Energy Innovation Centre, explores how electric vehicles (EVs), including those used by vulnerable consumers, can help with flexibility and household resilience.
Future resilience is likely to be delivered through coordinated networks of distributed resources including EVs, batteries and solar rather than solely through centralised infrastructure. We can model, test and trial new approaches for eliminating energy outages.
This points towards a broader shift to ‘resilience as a service’, enabled by innovations in data, automation and coordination across the energy system.
The fifth challenge extends this shift further by reimagining how the system is operated.
Achieving autonomous local balancing will require a transition from centralised system control towards coordinated, place-based optimisation. Energy Systems Catapult supports both network operators and innovators in exploring these models and understanding how co-location can support flexibility and system efficiency.
Our work with National Grid Electricity Transmission on nuclear co-generation explores how co-location could create new sources of network flexibility by adjusting demand at the point of generation. Approaches such as these promise more flexible pathways towards local balancing in the future.
Innovators are also developing solutions that can support decentralised balancing today.
At a community level, UrbanChain enables local coordination of generation and demand by matching producers and consumers within neighbourhood energy markets, reducing reliance on national balancing mechanisms while seeking to lower costs for participants.
At the building level, Grid Edge turns commercial buildings into responsive assets by coordinating demand with local grid conditions, reducing peak loads and improving system efficiency.
Capture Energy enables households to optimise battery use against predicted consumption and generation profiles, reducing costs while supporting local network stability.
Equiwatt aggregates domestic appliances into coordinated flexibility services, allowing devices such as EV chargers and heating systems to respond to local signals while rewarding consumers for participation.
These approaches can be supported by digital infrastructure providers such as Electron, which enables coordination between multiple market participants through digital flexibility platforms. This ensures participation is clean and the value is efficiently shared with households, businesses and system operators.
Across all five challenges, the issue isn’t a lack of innovation, or suitable innovators, but more around turning ideas into solutions that can be adopted and scaled in real networks.
This is where the Catapult can help – working with innovators to shape strong propositions, build the right partnerships and generate the evidence needed to move from pilot to real‑world impact.
Click on the ‘get in touch’ button below to discuss how we can help you turn ENIT challenges into scalable solutions.
Find out more about how Energy Systems Catapult can help you and your teams
Find out more about how Energy Systems Catapult can help you and your teams