Scottish Renewables has identified six key innovation areas and called the UK government to work with industry to help guide investment to deliver a low-carbon, low-cost energy sector.
Government innovation spending could deliver a world-leading energy system if £500 million of allocated funds are targeted correctly, a new paper from industry body Scottish Renewables states.
The organisation’s report identified six key priority areas for the allocation of the funds including wave and tidal energy, storage technologies, floating offshore wind, low-carbon heat, systems integration, and flexible networks.
Hannah Smith , Policy Officer at Scottish Renewables, said: “The UK Government’s commitment to double the spend on energy innovation to £500 million over five years has the potential to drive dramatic advances in our energy system.
“Scottish Renewables’ new paper highlights the importance of the strategic allocation of these funds, and identifies six technology areas that have real potential to benefit from this funding, propelling British business to the forefront of a truly world-leading, next-generation energy system.”
Smith added that the UK government is uniquely positioned to mobilise various resources and agencies, thus creating the right landscape for innovation to occur, which would lay the foundations for British businesses developing innovative products and services to flourish.
“Our world lead in tidal technology, for example, owes much to the continued development of onshore wind, with technology for the former deriving from decades of study into the latter. Now new technologies like wave energy and storage have the potential to revolutionise the way we produce energy,” concluded Smith.