7. ENERGY TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND DEMONSTRATION
costs for homeowners when calculating mortgage affordability). BEIS and HMT are cohosting a Green Finance Taskforce with leaders of the financial sector to accelerate the growth of green finance and help deliver the investment required to meet the United Kingdom’s carbon reduction targets. The government also promotes the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures to integrate the risks and opportunities posed by climate change into mainstream financial disclosures.
Monitoring and evaluation
The BEIS Energy Innovation Portfolio has developed a suite of portfolio key performance indicator (KPI) metrics to quantitatively measure the overall performance of the portfolio and assess spending. KPIs collect evidence at the project level to measure key outputs, outcomes, and impacts relevant to the strategic aims of the portfolio.
Energy Innovation Needs Assessments (EINA) look at evidence for the innovation needs of a range of clean energy technologies and the systems and processes in which they are utilised. They will help steer the prioritisation of UK funding with the objectives:
To create a methodology for conducting assessments of future innovation needs in a way that will produce comparable outputs across different technologies.
To facilitate efforts across government to identify strategic energy innovation areas for investment.
To analyse the role of technologies in the energy system.
To quantify the scale of the opportunity to United Kingdom in the regions of:
Reducing technology costs.
Expanding economic growth.
To help understand the uncertainty associated with the above estimates.
Once the methodology is tested and deemed successful, technology roadmaps for horizon 2050 will be developed in 2019.
International collaboration
The UK plays a leading role in international research efforts to strengthen collaboration with other countries (Chapter on General Energy Policy). The UK mainly focuses on the research of renewable energy, smart grid, nuclear, CCUS, and other technologies. It has also become a key contributor to leading the Super-Efficient Equipment and Appliance Deployment Initiative of the Clean Energy Ministerial, which identifies strategic alternatives to setting up test labs to better target and manage resources that support energy efficiency policies.
The UK actively participates in numerous international R&D platforms, where the exchange of knowledge plays a key role: Mission Innovation, IEA Technology Collaboration Programmes (TCPs), the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), the European
122
IEA. All rights reserved.
7. ENERGY TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND DEMONSTRATION
Union’s Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan, ERA-NETs, and Horizon-2020, among others.
Besides boosting clean energy RD&D funding, the United Kingdom wants to strengthen private sector engagement and investment in energy innovation, build new or strengthened international networks and partnerships in energy innovation, and increase awareness of the transformational potential of energy innovation, the progress being made, and the remaining gaps and opportunities.
International energy innovation funding
The International Energy Innovation activity can be split into four main areas:
UK government funding for R&D collaboration with developed countries
UK government funding for R&D collaboration with, in, or targeting developing countries (usually classified as overseas development assistance)
European funding for UK organisations
UK membership of multilateral organisations and fora.
Box 7.2 International leadership on innovation
The United Kingdom has been a member of Mission Innovation (MI) since its launch in November 2015 in Paris. The UK took over as Head of the MI Secretariat from the United States on 1 October 2017; then vice-chair of the Mission Innovation Steering Committee and chair since May 2019, and is a member of all the Innovation Challenges. The United Kingdom led the development of the Innovation Challenges to deepen collaboration and information sharing between members. The United Kingdom is a member of all eight Innovation Challenges and co-leads the Affordable Heating and Cooling in Buildings Innovation Challenge with the United Arab Emirates and European Union, and the CCUS Innovation Challenge with Saudi Arabia and Mexico.
As part of Mission Innovation, the United Kingdom is working with both the Breakthrough Energy Coalition and the World Economic Forum (WEF). At the One Planet Summit in Paris (December 2017), Breakthrough Energy founder Bill Gates announced public-private collaborations with five Mission Innovation members: Canada, European Commission, France, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is building on the WEF’s System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Energy to explore whether the outcomes of that project are relevant to the UK context. This includes a joint workshop held with business leaders and policy makers in May 2018.
The Energy Innovation Board has been developing an International Strategic Framework. Innovation features in the government’s international funding for development programmes.
Since 2013, BEIS, UKRI, and DFID (since 2016) have provided funding to enable the Energy Catalyst programme to invest almost GBP 100 million in grant funding across more than 750 organisations and 250 projects, via five rounds of open competition. Since DFID joined in round 4, the programme has included international overseas
123
ENERGY SYSTEM TRANSFORMATION
IEA. All rights reserved.