People often ask what makes me most optimistic about whether we’ll achieve a clean energy future. It isn’t about any one technology (although the improvements in some key clean technologies over my career have been astounding) or bit of policy announcement (although I remain a policy geek). No, it comes from spending time with brilliant clean energy businesses that we get to work with and ultimately support.

The UK isn’t short of promising innovators. The challenge has never been generating great ideas. It’s helping the best of them to scale – get investment, get customers, develop their product or service – so they can drive economic growth and deliver a clean, secure and affordable energy system.

That’s what Energy Systems Catapult exists to do: help those high potential businesses trial their innovations, attract the necessary investment and deploy their technologies and services at scale – while helping shape the markets and policies they need to thrive.

Backing the innovators building the future energy system

Since 2018, we’ve provided in-depth support to more than 300 innovators. Collectively, they’ve raised over £720 million in public and private investment so far.

Make no mistake, this is about hard economic sense as much as it’s about decarbonisation: cleantech is outpacing the wider economy, and scaling our innovators gives us a win at home and a shot at winning abroad.

This year, that progress has been visible across a range of companies we’ve supported:

• Sero raised £2 million to scale its energy service for reduced bills and warmer homes for residents in social housing (this fits with the kind of practical, targeted support we’ve been arguing for more widely, including how we help those who’ll need it most this winter).
• SMPNet won a contract with UKPN to use its grid optimisation tech to unlock hidden capacity, prevent curtailment and coordinate distributed energy resources.
• Sherwood Power secured its first order from a joint venture partner in China – opening the door to scaling its zero-emission energy storage technology internationally.

Independent analysis confirms what we’ve long suspected: SMEs we support raise more than twice as much as similar SMEs we haven’t helped. You can find out more about how we can help you here and innovators can request our support here.

Creating the conditions for innovation to thrive

But backing individual companies is only half the job. Innovation also needs the right regulatory and market conditions to succeed – which is why we work with government, regulators and industry, as much as with the innovators themselves, to remove barriers and open up new opportunities.

This year’s changes to the government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme is one example of policy change aiding innovation. They’ve opened the market for low-carbon heating options that were previously excluded, giving innovators a clear path in.

That will help innovators we’ve worked with, including Tepeo and Sunamp, whose heat battery technologies offer households another route to low-carbon heating alongside heat pumps.

We helped build the evidence base behind that change – through the Homes for Net Zero and Electrification of Heat trials, and our analytical work on air-to-air heat pumps.

Turning evidence into action across places and networks

The energy transition will be won place by place – a point Andy Burnham has made forcefully about ‘Manchesterism’ being a blueprint for regions to shape their own redevelopment and growth.

We helped Greater Manchester pilot Local Area Energy Planning (LAEP) before supporting its rollout across all ten boroughs.

This year we’ve gone further with Leicestershire County Council, piloting a first-of-a-kind digital LAEP. It models the whole energy system to crunch thousands of scenarios automatically, pinpointing where action matters most – from county to street level.

That means local government, network operators, investors and innovators can search for and identify where investment in low-regrets energy infrastructure matters most.

Driving innovation across the whole energy system

We’re also pushing innovation across the energy sector. Take energy networks – through RIIO-3 and the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), we’ve supported the Energy Networks Innovation Taskforce (ENIT) in shaping where a £500 million fund to rewire energy network innovation is needed most – opening up opportunities for companies making our grid smarter.

Beyond networks, we’re driving progress through the Hydrogen Innovation Initiative, the flexibility programme GridFlex, and our new Retrofit Accelerator programme.

Each tackles a different part of the energy transition challenge – and creates much needed space for innovators to test, prove and scale their solutions.

In February, we launched our latest Innovating to Net Zero research at an event that brought together some of the most exciting companies in the sector along with the big buyers of innovation, policymakers and regulators – our ‘whole system’ approach in a single building. We shared insights from our real-world energy trials and opened the floor to innovators leading the way on scaling up flexibility and driving down energy costs.

It was a powerful reminder that system-level change and business growth are two sides of the same coin.

What’s next?

Our focus for the year ahead: help innovators move faster, give decision-makers better evidence, and unlock more clean energy growth right across the UK (in every postcode, one might say).

Back the innovators. Shape the system to ensure that innovation can benefit consumers quickly. Turn great ideas into growth. That’s the job.