This competition is delivered in partnership with the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem). It is funded by the Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund, which aims to deliver net zero at lowest cost to consumers and support innovative businesses to grow and scale.
Discovery is the first phase of a 3 phase competition:
Discovery
Alpha
Beta
There are 4 challenge competitions in Discovery Phase:
- Ofgem Round 2: Supporting a just energy transition
- Ofgem Round 2: Preparing for a net zero power system (this competition)
- Ofgem Round 2: Improving energy system resilience and robustness
- Ofgem Round 2: Accelerating decarbonisation of major energy demands
It is the responsibility of the lead applicant to ensure that they are entering the appropriate challenge competition for their project.
Successful applicants from the Discovery Phase will be invited to apply for the Alpha Phase.
In applying to this Discovery Phase competition, you are entering into a competitive process.
Any adoption and implementation of a solution from this competition would be subject to a separate, possibly competitive, procurement exercise.
Funding type - Third-party
Project size - Your Discovery Phase Project must last up to three months and have a total requested funding of no more than £150,000, exclusive of VAT.
Your proposal
The Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) aims to deliver net zero at lowest cost to consumers and support innovative businesses to grow and scale.
This can include decarbonising gas and electric energy distribution, transmission networks and benefit the consumer. These projects should help shape the future of the gas and electricity networks and succeed commercially where possible.
The aims of this competition are to:
develop innovations in technology, markets and standards that help the power system be ready for net zero by 2035
develop evidence on the technical and commercial capability of new assets to provide power stability services
support the system integration of novel assets including the necessary digital interfaces and their market accessibility to help increase the pool of resources providing system stability services ahead of 2035
Your project must focus on and address at least one of these areas:
novel ways to reliably support low stability systems
accessing grid or system support from novel supply and demand side sources
Your project must meet the eligibility criteria of the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), as stipulated in the SIF Governance Document.
Over the three phases, applicants must demonstrate that projects deliver a net benefit to network consumers through:
financial cost reductions (operating the network, energy bills, users of network services)
carbon emission reduction
access to revenues for users of energy network services; or introducing products, process and services that are new to the UK energy market
Your proposal must focus on network innovation that can be deployed or applied to benefit GB energy networks infrastructure, network consumers, operation, and utilisation.
Your project must address:
users and their context
constraints affecting the problem or wider context
opportunities for improvement
environmental impacts
At this stage a Project Direction will be issued for the Discovery Phase only. Only successful applicants from Discovery Phase will be invited to apply for Alpha Phase.
The Alpha Phase of a project will focus on preparing and testing the different solutions to the problem identified during the Discovery Phase ahead of any future large-scale demonstration of the project. It will also include testing of the riskiest assumptions.
Projects we will not fund
Ofgem will not fund projects that do not meet the requirements of the SIF Governance Document.
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