To lead a Discovery Phase Project, you must:

• be an Ofgem licensed gas distribution network, gas transmission, electricity transmission, electricity distribution, or National Energy System Operator (NESO)
• work with at least one other organisation as a Project Partner

For this Competition, there are no specific Project Partner requirements in addition to the lead network licensee.

You are encouraged to have other Project Partners in addition to the mandatory requirements. Your Project Partners can include a variety of third party innovators such as:

• start-ups
• SMEs
• suppliers
• academics
• independent researchers
• disruptors
• other licenced energy network companies

If you are not eligible to lead a project but have a proposal you would like to bring forward, please contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Energy team to discuss possible collaborations.

Your Project must:

• have total eligible Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) requested funding of no more than £200,000, exclusive of VAT
• provide a minimum of 10% of total Project costs as a compulsory contribution from private funds (matched contributions that exceed the 10% mandatory minimum contribution will be assessed as delivering greater value for money)
• start after 1 January 2027
• end by 31 May 2027
• be completed within the five month window

Your Project deliverables must be completed within the five month window stated.

You are required to fulfil all monitoring requirements, for example, end of phase meetings and Project show and tells; further guidance will be provided to successful applicants.

This competition is delivered by Innovate UK 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.

Each Innovation Challenge as listed in the Innovation Challenge document has different aims. You must select which challenge your Project is working on:

• Challenge 1: Industrial and business connection acceleration
• Challenge 2: Faster build and maintenance
• Challenge 3: Instant use domestic energy devices
• Challenge 4: Eliminating energy outages
• Challenge 5: Decentralised system balancing

Your Project must meet the eligibility criteria of the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), as stipulated in the SIF Governance Document.

Applicants must demonstrate that the Projects deliver a net benefit to consumers through:

• financial cost reductions, for example, in operating the network, energy bills, users of network services
• emission reduction
• access to revenues for network users
• introducing new products, process and services to the UK energy market

Your proposal must focus on network innovation that can benefit GB energy network infrastructure, consumers, operation, and utilisation.

You 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. Successful applicants will be invited to apply for Alpha Phase.

The Discovery Phase of a Project will define the problem and the value in solving it. It will also facilitate a common understanding of consumers’ and network users’ needs from the innovation and identifying constraints.

The Alpha Phase will focus on preparing and testing solutions that are identified during the Discovery Phase, ahead of any large scale demonstration of the Project in the Beta Phase. The Deployment phase must have a proven solution to be deployed into business as usual.

Any proposed Project against any of the themes must also consider contributing to the key cross cutting areas:

Cost reduction: Drastically reducing whole life infrastructure costs and enhancing resilience aims to ensure affordability and unlock billions in economic savings and opportunity. New business models and service definitions will allow value to be better realised by customers.

Customer outcomes: Radically simpler engagement with networks to connect assets, and significantly higher resilience, meet the needs of customers from households to major sites.

Economic growth: Accelerating connections across vectors and asset scales, and minimising the disruption caused by infrastructure works, will streamline expansion of energy-intensive sites and uptake of new technology by consumers.

Decarbonisation: Reshaping the architecture of system operations is a prerequisite for the rapid connection of tens of millions of smart, flexible decarbonised demand assets. Time and cost efficiency of infrastructure deployment allow the networks to support new clean energy resources to come on stream.

An applicant briefing was held on 21 September at 10am: a recording and slides will be available soon.

If you have any questions about the scope requirements of this competition, email SIF_Ofgem@iuk.ukri.org or join our optional applicant drop-in sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3pm.

If you would like to find a collaboration partner or have queries about which competition and challenge is most appropriate for your technology, please contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Energy team.