Reports and Insight Papers

This study explores why existing UK support for energy innovation is good at advancing new technologies through university funding and at supporting big industrial innovators in sectors like solar and offshore wind. But, it is poor at the bit in the middle: helping smaller innovators to commercialise.

The analysis in Nuclear for Net Zero has found there is a credible path available to realise significant nuclear cost reduction delivering potentially lower costs and risks associated with achieving UK Net Zero.

Energy Systems Catapult has incorporated air quality pollutant emissions into the Energy Systems Modelling Environment (ESME), to enable a whole systems scenarios to be modelled for decarbonisation and clean air. ESME is used to inform energy policy, innovation spending and other strategic analysis. Now, it can be used to systematically explore the co-benefits and trade-offs between these two agendas, including at a regional scale.

Digitalisation for Net Zero assesses the potential of digital technology to transform the energy system, including real-world case studies being developed by UK innovators.

Energy from Waste (EfW) plants are on track to emit around 20 Mte CO2 per year in the near future, with existing, proposed and under-construction facilities. Preliminary analysis on the potential of fitting Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage to EfW plants, show the cost of the technology as a means of emissions abatement is competitive with other industrial abatement options.

As part of the Innovating to Net Zero project funded by Innovate UK, we surveyed over 2,000 people and conducted focus groups to understand public perception on climate change and attitudes towards actions to tackle it.

A new report by Energy Systems Catapult has found Net Zero by 2050 is possible if the UK supports innovation and scale-up across three essential areas – Low Carbon Technology, Land Use and Lifestyle.

With the UK legislating a target to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions across the economy by 2050, the case for an enduring policy framework to decarbonise buildings  is clear: everything – all buildings, cars, and industries – must be zero carbon in aggregate by 2050. 

This report describes the lessons learned from developing and using a Living Lab of real homes and consumers and how this might be developed and used in the future to support innovation in decarbonising domestic energy for government and industry.

This report details the findings of the 2018/19 Living Lab Winter Trial, where households were offered the chance to buy heat as a service with ‘Heat Plans’ that sold them ‘Warm Hours’ instead of kilowatt hours.

This report describes findings from a trial conducted over the winter of 2018/19 to understand if homeowners could use a hybrid heating system to get comfortably warm at home.

The Electric Vehicle Energy Taskforce has made 21 key proposals to government and industry following an unprecedented collaboration including more than 350 organisations including many household names.