ROCKWOOL is looking at the possibility of switching power during its manufacturing process from gas to green hydrogen.
The insulation giant has linked-up with Marubeni Europower and Mott MacDonald to develop a potential end-to-end hydrogen solution at its South Wales plant in Bridgend.
The research is being funded by the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP) under the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy through the Industrial Hydrogen Accelerator programme.
The current process for the manufacture of ROCKWOOL’s stone wool insulation uses natural gas in the combustion systems and curing ovens. This new scheme will investigate the viability of converting natural gas usage to on-site produced green hydrogen.
Rafael Rodriguez, Managing Director of ROCKWOOL Ltd said: “The group has set ambitious decarbonisation targets verified and approved by the Science Based Target initiative, and in line with this, we are looking forward to enhancing our own understanding about the potential for green hydrogen use in our business.”
Claudio Tassistro, Energy General Manager for Mott MacDonald, said: “Our multidisciplinary team has worked on green hydrogen generation and storage projects across the world and will bring with it a wealth of knowledge, and technical and economic expertise.
“The development of green hydrogen production projects like this are critical to achieving our net-zero ambitions and meeting the challenges posed by the climate crisis.”
PepsiCo UK, Walkers parent company, is introducing cardboard boxes for its multi-packs of crisps in a bid to remove tonnes of plastic from its supply chain
PepsiCo UK has recently announced a £14mn investment in new sustainable food packaging innovations that will remove 250 tonnes of virgin plastic from its supply chain annually.
The outer plastic packaging on millions of Walkers 22 and 24 bag multipacks will be replaced with a new cardboard design which reduces the amount of virgin plastic the company uses.
“We are constantly exploring new scalable solutions and this investment marks an important step forward, delivering a huge reduction in virgin plastic across some of our best-selling ranges, while also helping to tackle our carbon footprint,” says Simon Devaney, Sustainable Packaging Director, PepsiCo UK & Ireland.
“Reducing virgin plastic across our supply chain is a key part of our commitment to creating a world where packaging never becomes waste.”
After a successful trial with Tesco, the new and improved multipack outer packaging will be on-shelves in all major supermarkets in the UK in the coming weeks.
Saving 250 tonnes of plastic from the supply chain
Alongside the new packaging design, PepsiCo has also invested in a new stretch film to wrap around its pallets before these are distributed to retailers.
This new film is produced using nanotechnology which puts tiny air bubbles into the film to reduce the amount of plastic used, while retaining the same strength and stretch needed to protect the crisps as they travel to stores across the country.
According to the company, the use of this new technology will lead to a 40% reduction in virgin plastic year on year, compared to the previous film. Reducing the amount of fossil-fuel based virgin plastic in the shrink wrap will also reduce the company’s annual carbon emissions by 465 tonnes.
The investment marks a major step towards PepsiCo’s goal of eliminating virgin fossil-based plastic from its crisp and snack bags across Europe by 2030.
In the UK, the company is also planning to trial new solutions, including packaging made from recycled plastic for its snack bags. This all forms part of PepsiCo Positive, the company’s health and sustainability transformation plan, which includes an ambition of reaching net zero emissions by 2040.
Tesco has accelerated its plans for halving food waste in operations, bringing the commitment’s deadline forward from 2030 to 2025.
The supermarket first set the target five years ago, in alignment with target 12.3 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs). It set a baseline year of the 2016/17 financial year.
By the end of the 2021/22 financial year, the business had delivered a 45% reduction in operational food waste against this baseline. Given that it was, therefore, on track to exceed the 2030 target, it has pulled the deadline forward to 2025.
Actions which Tesco has already taken to reduce food waste in its operations have included forging partnerships with FareShare and OLIO to divert surplus food to communities; diverting surplus food not fit for human consumption to suppliers that can use it for animal feed; stocking ‘wonky’ produce to help reduce waste on farms and allowing store staff to take home foods approaching their use-by dates for free.
Tesco has been reporting food waste data since 2013 and was the first UK supermarket to do so
Tesco has also moved this week to link executive pay to the delivery of the accelerated target. It had already linked a quarter of the Performance Share Plan awards Executive Directors receive to progress on other key environmental and social targets, including those on emissions and on gender and ethnicity representation. Now, food waste will be added.
Tesco Group’s chief executive Ken Murphy said he hopes that the changes will “drive further transformative change”.
He also called on other businesses to follow suit, and for policymaking to raise the bar across the UK’s grocery sector. Murphy said: “The work we and our suppliers do won’t tackle the issue alone. We have long called for Government to introduce mandatory food waste reporting to help measure and judge if real action is happening. Action must be taken across the whole industry.”
Tesco is notably working with Defra on its ‘Step Up To The Plate’ pledge, which helps businesses and individuals align with SDG 12.3 and provides a platform for Ministers to receive recommendations for targeted policy support.
The pledge requires corporate signatories to adopt WRAP’s food waste reduction roadmap. The framework, built in partnership with charity IGD, sets out how organisations can measure and act on wastage levels across a “farm-to-fork” approach.
But, as Murphy said, the business wants the UK Government to go further and mandate that supermarkets publicly publish their food waste data in a uniform fashion.
Norwegian energy developer Statkraft has announced plans to develop a major green hydrogen production hub at the site of disused rail storage in Pembrokeshire.
The company is looking to transform the site of the former Royal Navy Armaments Depot into a green hydrogen production capacity of around 30GW. The hydrogen generated there, using electrolysis, would be used to serve the transport, manufacturing and industrial sectors.
Renewable electricity to serve the Trecwn Green Energy Hub will be generated from three onshore wind turbines and a ground-mounted solar array under Statkraft’s plans.
Statkraft told edie that it is hoping to submit the plans by the end of 2023. If the planning process runs smoothly, the site could be operational by the end of 2026. Around 5,000 homes and businesses in the local area will be contacted by Statkraft in the coming weeks asking if they would like to participate in consultations.
Statkraft UK’s head of RES eFuels and European wind and solar, Matt Kelly, said the project “presents an exciting opportunity to produce homegrown green energy for local use and has the potential to act a catalyst for the redevelopment of Trecwn Valley.”
The UK Government has committed to growing national low-carbon hydrogen production capacity to 10GW by 2030. At least half of this will need to be green. Hydrogen is considered necessary to the net-zero transition, for decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as heavy transport and heavy industry. It produces no greenhouse gases at the point of combustion. However, most global production is currently fossil-fuelled, meaning that it is not a low-carbon solution across the lifecycle.
Funds and accelerators
In related news, Hy24 Partners – a joint venture from investment firms FiveT Hydrogen and Ardian – has closed what it claims is the world’s largest infrastructure fund for the low-carbon hydrogen sector to date.
The €2bn fund will be used to invest across the hydrogen value chain. As well as production, storage and distribution will be supported.
Among the investors in the fund are TotalEnergies, Air Liquide, Airbus, AXA and Allianz. In total, it attracted more than 50 investors from 13 countries.
Hy24Partners estimates that the fund will enable the deployment of up to €20bn of investment within a six-year period.
Elsewhere, the Carbon Trust has announced a new clean hydrogen accelerator with backing from the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Modelled on the Trust’s offshore wind accelerator, the aim of the project is to help achieve economies of scale for clean hydrogen, so that it becomes cost-competitive with the grey (fossil) hydrogen that dominates global markets today.
The accelerator will convene players across the British hydrogen value chain for innovation programmes. It will cover all production methods which can comply with BEIS’s Low-Carbon Hydrogen Standard.
“This new clean hydrogen accelerator fills a gap in the current innovation landscape by focusing on stimulating the supply chain,” said the Carbon Trust’s chair Baroness Brown.
At this point, the Carbon Trust is calling for new industry participants to join the accelerator. Its first step will be to shape a plan for innovation programmes.
Scientists from the University of Leicester in the UK have discovered a process to recover silver and aluminum from used PV cells that is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than current recycling processes using mineral acids.
The researchers used the technology on crystalline solar cells measuring 12 × 15 cm, weighing 2 g, and consisting of a 100 µm thick silicon wafer, coated with a 100 nm thick silicon nitride anti-reflective layer on the front side and a 20 µm thick layer of aluminum on the back side, both stripped with silver electrodes approximately 30 μm high.
“First, we place the solar cell in an aluminum chloride solution. The aluminum electrode is removed from the silicon wafer. We use ultrasound to promote the dissolution of the aluminum, which takes place within a few minutes,” researcher Guillaume Zante told pv magazine.
Given the low cost of aluminum, there may be no economic interest in recovering it, but the aluminum salt solution could be used for wastewater treatment purposes, according to the scientists. “In the second step, the silver is dissolved from the solar cell using iron chloride, an oxidizing agent, in a choline chloride or calcium chloride brine, which takes around 10 minutes,” Zante explained, noting that the components of these two brines, or salt water, are found in chicken feed and grit used on roads to avoid ice, respectively, and are thus widely available, cheap, and low on toxicity.
“It is interesting to note that iron dissolved in water cannot oxidize silver, but iron dissolved in the brine can. Using a brine instead of water improves the ability of iron to oxidize silver and improves the solubility of silver in the brine,” Zante said. “This is due to the presence of chloride ions in the brine. The addition of water to the brine dilutes the chloride ions, allowing the silver chloride to precipitate. Silver chloride is easily filtered from the solution.”
This process successfully recovers silver chloride with a purity of 98%, which according to the researchers could be converted into metallic silver in a further step, thereby increasing its purity. The process does not affect the silicon wafer and nitride anti-reflective coating, leaving open the possibility to reuse the silicon in PV panels or processing it for other uses.
The results were obtained in a lab setting, using a few grams of solar cells, and may differ at an industrial scale. However, the authors believe that industrialization is feasible due to their use of cheap, low-toxicity and readily available chemicals. “Since we are using cheap chemicals, the price could be as low as the processing costs with mineral acids and in some cases cheaper, around $0.4 lower per kilogram of solar cell as compared to mineral acids,” Zante affirmed.
They presented their findings in “Efficient recycling of metals from solar cells using catalytic etchants,” which was recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. The scientists are currently developing a strategy to scale up the technology and to extract other metals from waste sources, including bismuth, tellurium and copper from thermoelectric materials, which are used in perovskite, thin film, and wiring and cabling in solar cells, respectively. They are also attempting to extract gold, nickel and copper from printed circuit-boards, as well as neodymium and dysprosium from waste magnets. The academics are part of the Met4Tech project, which supports the creation of a circular economy for technology metals.
We’ve all heard of planting trees to combat climate change. Now, a team in Nova Scotia is working on “reforestation” for the ocean.
Dalhousie University and the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax are managing a project this summer to plant an often overlooked species — eelgrass — in the race to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
To the untrained eye, eelgrass looks like your average seaweed, but project lead Kristina Boerder says it’s much more.
“It’s a bit of a treasure, a secret treasure. Not a lot of people know about it,” said Boerder.
Eelgrass boosts biodiversity along shorelines by providing shelter for young fish, crustaceans and even food for some waterfowl. It also has many benefits for humans.
Eelgrass stores carbon and methane in its root system
“It protects our coasts from erosion. It’s good for water quality. And also it stores our emissions. So it’s a secret weapon in our fight [against] climate change,” she says.
Seagrasses on the whole absorb carbon and methane through photosynthesis and sequester them in their root systems. One study estimates an acre of seagrass can store over 335 kilograms of carbon per year — the equivalent of carbon emitted by a car driving from Yarmouth, N.S. to Dingwall, N.S. eight times.
Researchers are working to see how effective eelgrass is at carbon storage in Nova Scotia specifically.
The group is using different methods of planting eelgrass to see which is most effective.
Its carbon-storing root system also helps moderate levels of acid in the ocean, which are rising due to climate change and damaging the health of some marine life.
But eelgrass meadows are shrinking, according to researchers due to damage from coastal development, pollution, invasive species and some types of fisheries mooring and anchoring practices.
This loss of seagrass meadows is a global phenomenon. One study estimated the world loses up to two football fields worth of seagrass each hour. Boerder says something needs to be done.
Boerder, along with students from Dalhousie and volunteers from the Ecology Action Centre, have spent the summer with snorkels and wetsuits out in the water, working to regenerate this precious plant.
Amy Irvine is a marine biology masters student involved with the project who endures long, muddy, cold days to plant the eelgrass.
“When you see all the trees around you, you recognize how important they are. But then when you come to the ocean, you don’t think about this,” she said, holding up a piece of the eelgrass.
The study
The team’s days are long. Starting at 7 a.m. and going until 6 in the evening.
They meet at Cherry Hill Beach to harvest eelgrass from a lush bed where they suit up, wade in and fill buckets with the green grass.
“This is actually the easiest part of the day,” said Irvine. This area is shallow and warm compared to the area where the eelgrass is transplanted.
The planters swim out, with Boerder following them in a boat. She hands them the grass and they dive down through the cloudy water to plant it.
They are trying different planting methods to see which is most effective.
“We don’t know what works best for Nova Scotian Water. So we’ve got to explore that first,” said Boerder.
The experiment consists of four different methods: planting seeds on their own, planting seeds in burlap sacks, planting sods, or the full plant with its roots, and planting shoots. They’ve planted over 6,000 eelgrass plants using these methods.
When it comes to improving biodiversity, planter Lauren La Porte says she’s already seeing some results.
“Every time we’re snorkeling, we see little critters swimming along in there, we see crabs and lobsters, and those are super beneficial to our local fisheries. ”
Civilian science
Jordy Thomson, the senior marine coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre, is happy to see volunteers coming out to help plant the eelgrass.
“We want to build up public momentum for an interest in conservation of eelgrass as a really critical coastal species for us here in Nova Scotia.”
Thomson says community involvement has been key for the project. People offered up their private land for the group to provide access to ocean beds, and volunteers have been helping collect data on eelgrass by filming from their kayaks.
Many people have also been sending information about eelgrass through the iNaturalist app.
INaturalist is an app that encourages citizen science and the Ecology Action Centre asks people to upload photos of eelgrass beds to the app to help map their distribution and better understand their health throughout the province.
“We really are looking for anybody in Nova Scotia who lives or spends time along the coast to get involved and to send in some photos of eelgrass meadows in their area,” Thomson said.
Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy could save the world as much as $12tn (£10.2tn) by 2050, an Oxford University study says.
The report said it was wrong and pessimistic to claim that moving quickly towards cleaner energy sources was expensive.
Gas prices have soared on mounting concerns over energy supplies.
But the researchers say that going green now makes economic sense because of the falling cost of renewables.
The cost of green energy like wind and solar has been falling for decades
“Even if you’re a climate denier, you should be on board with what we’re advocating,” Prof Doyne Farmer from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School told BBC News.
“Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green energy transition because it’s going to save us money,” he said.
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The report’s findings are based on looking at historic price data for renewables and fossil fuels and then modelling how they’re likely to change in the future.
The data for fossil fuels goes from 2020 back more than 100 years and shows that after accounting for inflation, and market volatility, the price hasn’t changed much.
Renewables have only been around for a few decades, so there’s less data. But in that time continual improvements in technology have meant the cost of solar and wind power have fallen rapidly, at a rate approaching 10% a year.
The report’s expectation that the price of renewables will continue to fall is based on “probabilistic” modelling, using data on how massive investment and economies of scale have made other similar technologies cheaper.
“Our latest research shows scaling-up key green technologies will continue to drive their costs down, and the faster we go, the more we will save,” says Dr Rupert Way, the report’s lead author from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
Wind and solar are already the cheapest option for new power projects, but questions remain over how to best store power and balance the grid when the changes in the weather leads to fall in renewable output.
Cost of net zero
Back in 2019 Philip Hammond, then Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote to the prime minister to say that the cost of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in the UK would be more than £1tn. This report says the likely costs have been over-estimated and have deterred investment.
It also says predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the cost of keeping global temperatures rises under 2 degrees would correspond to a loss of GDP by 2050 were too pessimistic. The transition to renewables was, it says, likely to turn out to be a “net economic benefit”.
The research has been published in the journal Joule and is a collaboration between the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, the Oxford Martin Programme on the Post-Carbon Transition, the Smith School of Enterprise & Environment at the University of Oxford, and SoDa Labs at Monash University.
The new RSPB report, published on 31 August finds that the UK can continue to generate renewables at sea while also strengthening efforts to protect nature, creating mutual benefits that help tackle the climate and ecological crises.
The report finds that as the UK moves to scale up wind farm expansions from 15GW currently, policymakers and project developers will need to consider the “substantial footprint” this will have around UK coasts.
The report calls for policymakers to introduce “robust” evidence based on ecological grounds to outline the environmental costs of setting new offshore windfarms into the seabed. It also calls for Impact assessments that identify cumulative impacts based on location and for country-level marine plans to be introduced to provide better clarity for project development.
Pictured: The 400MW Rampion Offshore Wind Farm
Recommendations also include introducing adaptive management techniques that would provide project flexibility if new research were to surface and, where necessary, strategic compensation based on ecological impacts.
An overarching theme of the report is the need for a “marine net-gain” system to ensure that renewables development contributes to environmental restoration.
RenewableUK’s Environmental Policy Analyst Juliette Webb said: ”Not only are new offshore wind farms lowering our energy bills, but they also remain critical to tackling climate change, which poses the greatest threat to bird populations and our natural environment. It’s vitally important that we build well-sited clean energy projects to reach net zero as fast as possible.
“We’re working with the RSPB to ensure that we develop offshore wind farms in an environmentally sensitive way that protects birds and support marine ecosystems. This includes adapting the location of our wind farms and providing specially-designed safe places for birds to nest at sea.”
It was recently revealed that more than a fifth of capacity additions to the global offshore wind market came from the UK in 2021, with the industry creating enough green energy to power one-third of UK homes.
The Crown Estate’s tenth annual Offshore Wind Report found that global offshore wind capacity reached more than 48.2GW, of which more than 20% came from the UK. The report adds that, by the end of 2021, the capacity of fully commissioned sites in the UK had reached 11.3GW – an 8% increase compared to 2020.
Offshore wind energy generation in 2021 was enough to cover the needs of 33% of UK homes. In 2011, this figure was just 4%. The UK Government notably has a commitment for the nation to host 40GW of offshore wind by 2030.
While the UK is surging towards its ambitious targets for offshore wind, much more is needed from policymakers to support nature. A preliminary report from the GFI last October highlighted how planned public spending on nature conservation and restoration in the UK for 2022-2032 is up to £97bn short of the levels needed to deliver commitments made by the UK Government and devolved governments.
While there are legally binding targets to halting species decline, the report urges that a joined up approach be introduced to help embed this into the wider net-zero target.
RSPB’s Katie-jo Luxton sadi: “We have a clear vision of what we want to achieve; thriving seabird colonies and sustainable energy. However, the current system is not working. Energy companies are being locked into development sites that are problematic for wildlife and the Secretary of State is regularly being asked to make impossible decisions that may achieve our energy targets but only at the expense of our seabirds and marine habitats.
“We need to change this, as the decisions we make today will have long lasting and potentially irreversible effects on seabird colonies that are already struggling. This report clearly states what we need to do at a time when decision-makers are beginning to plan new developments. With the right planning and a cross sector approach, we can achieve world leading ocean recovery and secure renewable energy, but only if we take transformative Nature Positive action, now.”
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has today (26 August) published a Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan and opened consultations on the key measures included.
Included in the plan is a requirement for all water companies to significantly reduce – and improve the quality of – all storm overflows discharging into or near designated bathing water by 2035. Environment Agency data for 2021 states that untreated sewage was discharged into coastal bathing waters across England for a total of 160,000 hours, in 25,000 separate discharge incidents.
Water companies would also need to improve three-quarters of the overflows discharging into nature sites classed as high-priority by 2035. Companies would then need to address all other overflows by 2050 regardless of location. The idea of ending the practice entirely is considered, but Defra ultimately concludes that they will still be allowed when there is heavy rainfall and no risk of immediate, negative impacts on the environment.
“Overflows that are causing the most harm will be addressed first to make the biggest difference as quickly as possible, and water companies will be expected to consider nature-based solutions in their planning,” Defra has stated.
To enable the tracking of progress, the Plan sets out a commitment for all overflows to have working monitors installed by the end of 2023. The Liberal Democrats claimed this week they have evidence that sewage monitors installed by water companies did not work 90% of the time in 2021. Companies will be required to publish discharge information in near real-time under the Plan.
Overall, the plan states, water companies will collectively need to invest £56bn in monitoring, infrastructure, process changes and skills needed to reduce sewage pollution through to 2050. MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) have stated this is significant, as it will require the sector to double the average annual level of investment it has made since 1989. This is when the water sector was privatised.
The Plan stipulates that water firms must not pass these costs on to customers at a rate of more than £1 extra per month, for domestic customers, for the first five years of implementation. This will cover 2025 to 2030.
Rights, regulations and governance
The Plan goes on to propose several changes to the rights of water firms, how the sector should be regulated, and what governance mechanisms companies should bring in.
On the former, the Plan explores the possibility of removing mechanisms which give property developers the automatic right to connect to sewer networks. Water firms have long argued that this automatic right can result in sewer networks becoming overwhelmed, making the need to trigger storm overflows more likely. Should this change be implemented, a new ‘approving body’ would need to be created or appointed to oversee applications from developers.
Paired with this proposal is the possibility of subjecting developers to new standards for sustainable drainage systems. Additionally proposed are new rights for water companies to repair defective drains on private property.
On governance, the Plan proposes measures to ensure that water companies’ environmental performance is more closely tied to dividend payments. Much ire has been directed at water companies this summer for increasing profits and executive pay with little done by some to improve leaks and reduce storm overflows.
“The government supports Ofwat’s recent proposals which would provide extra powers for enforcement action against companies that don’t link dividend payments to their environmental performance, or who failed to be transparent about their dividend pay-outs,” Defra has stated.
Tough or toothless?
Defra has called the Plan’s targets the “toughest ever” in this space. But not everyone is convinced.
The Lib Dems’ environment spokesperson Tim Farron called the targets “flimsy” and claimed that the timelines were unambitious, not reflecting the need to improve bathing water quality in the near term.
Farron said: “This government plan is a licence to pump sewage on to our beaches and in our treasured rivers and lakes.
“This is a cruel joke. The government is going to hike water bills to pay for cleaning up the mess made by water companies. The same companies who awarded their executives multimillion-pound bonuses this year and paid out over £1bn to their shareholders. Whilst they roll in the cash, we swim in sewage. The whole thing stinks.”
Labour’s Jim McMahon, the Shadow Environment Secretary, said the document is “neither a plan, nor does it eliminate sewage dumping into our natural environment”. Like Farron, he called for more immediate action.
McMahon said: “Under the Government’s weak improvement ‘target’, based on last year’s data we’d face another 4.8m sewage spill events in our country between now and 2035.”
Elsewhere, there has been confusion about whether the Plan contains loopholes for overflows in some areas. The Marine Conservation Society’s water quality policy and advocacy manager Rachel Wyatt said: “Defra can’t provide a list to us of the storm overflows which aren’t going to included [in the targets] – which is ridiculous in itself – so these overflows could be discharging into marine protected areas, shellfish waters or other beaches which are not designated as bathing waters.”
For many companies, a net zero transition will prove a complex and expensive pathway, despite the importance of this change.
Governments worldwide have made ambitious net zero commitments. They are using fiscal policies to encourage this business transformation in their jurisdictions and beyond.
Some of these policies are incentives – both discretionary (e.g. grants) or statutory (e.g. tax credits) – that are made available to support a business journey towards net zero.
However, these incentives are many and varied, and getting lost in the complicated and crowded landscape is easy. Additionally, many discretionary programmes are competitive, with limited funding. Therefore, only the ‘best’ projects receive funding.
How, then, can a business effectively approach access to discretionary incentives?
1) Understand Government priorities
Rather than tackling individual funding competitions in isolation, your business should look to understand how its long-term strategy aligns with Government priorities.
Alignment of your plans to Government policy benefits the development of grant applications. This is because grants and other incentives are designed to enforce policies that drive the economy in a particular direction.
For instance, the UK Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution lays out actions in key areas such as hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and offshore wind to transition the UK to a net zero future.
Government funding is therefore to prioritise and facilitate this transition. This can be by stimulating innovation to close knowledge gaps and by improving the return on investment on technologies that are not currently economically attractive.
Being able to effectively express alignment with Government sustainability plans is key to a successful application.
2) Think “outside in” to express your value
Most companies think “inside out” when they apply for funding – presenting their challenges and funding needs as the central driver for the grant request.
However, focusing on public priorities, rather than just the need for funding, enables an “outside-in” approach. This looks at the challenges the country needs to overcome to reach its objectives. It then allows the application to show how the proposed project contributes to the solution.
For instance, if the high cost of storage limits the amount of renewable energy that can be used on the grid, developing a new low-cost, efficient and rapidly deployable storage solution can positively impact renewable energy uptake, and would therefore be aligned with Government priorities.
3) Engage with funding consultations and policymakers
Governments often design incentive programmes in consultation with industrial players who are likely to bring priority-aligned solutions.
To take the earlier example around the amount of renewable energy that can used on the grid, energy companies may highlight that to be able to offer more of this resource, they need storage solutions more urgently than better solar panels. This could then lead to funding availability for these solutions in priority to other areas.
For a business engaging with policymakers, it is vital to connect with the right stakeholders and make pro-active contributions to funding consultations as this is likely to lead to better opportunities in the future.
There is an ever-evolving and competitive landscape for discretionary sustainability incentives and it is critical that businesses take a coordinated approach to incentives. Demonstrating how your strategy aligns with Government sustainability priorities can provide access to more funding opportunities, expedite application preparation, and improve your chance of application success.
