Cities across the world are facing huge environmental challenges related to climate change. These can range from air quality issues to the need to support the electric vehicle transition and support the uptake of clean energy generation.

Cities need and want to act – but often lack resources to tackle these challenges in a holistic manner, incorporate innovative solutions and untangle the complex knot of issues they face.

The Innovating for Clean Air (IfCA) project showed an innovative approach to addressing these issues. Led by Energy Systems Catapult, the project was delivered between 2018 and 2021, included collaboration with a number of UK and Indian partners and supported the development of an innovative business ecosystem to develop and showcase solutions, raised citizen awareness and helped share valuable knowledge and best practice between the UK and India.

Key points

The IfCA project was delivered remotely, and to tight timescales, but successfully delivered considerable impact, including:

• 4 pilot projects were enabled in Bengaluru exploring solutions to challenges such as logistics decarbonisation, dynamic pricing and energy infrastructure planning. The projects involved innovators from both the UK and India and are actively helping to move industry driven solutions for the Net Zero transition.
• 7 UK Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) received hands-on support to prepare them for the Indian market to develop their pitches and offerings accordingly and to connect with Indian organisations. This has created  commercial opportunities for UK SMEs and also chances to provide their carbon reducing initiatives into the Indian economy
• Research outputs supporting potential development of an online platform, linked to Mission Innovation, that can provide valuable visibility of challenges, support networks, proven solutions and funding opportunities.
• A prototype charge point modelling tool has been developed that has helped to develop new capabilities at IISc and can support Bengaluru’s electricity utility, BESCOM, to make informed decisions about the location of
  charge point installations.

UKRI allocated funding to a portfolio of three follow-on projects to expand and build on the impacts of IfCA. These included:

• Extension of IfCA to expand on the phase 1 project and allow further deployment of innovative solutions currently being deployed in Bengaluru/Karnataka.
• Collaboration with Clean Energy International Incubation Centre to support the development of a clean energy platform resource to link innovations internationally and to show the value of bilateral collaboration by supporting a cohort of UK firms to explore the Indian market.
• Development of a model for EV charge point location optimisation, to support planners and policymakers in making evidence-based decisions on the siting of charge point infrastructure.