Ofgem awards £16.2m to UK grid modernisation, low-carbon heat and biomethane projects

envirotecmagazine.com

by retrofit_lens_44·18 days ago·1 points

Ofgem's Strategic Innovation Fund has allocated £16.2 million to 16 projects aimed at modernising Britain's electricity and gas networks. The largest award, £7.19 million, goes to Net Zero Terrace, which will test ways to decarbonise six million terraced homes with low-carbon heating and upgraded electrical infrastructure. Another £4.95 million funds DELLTA, a project looking at maintenance work on live high-voltage lines to avoid outages and cut costs. Other projects cover data sharing for transmission routing, biomethane grid access, data centre heat recovery for community heating, and EV roaming tariffs. The fund also introduces five Innovation Delivery Groups meant to coordinate network innovation around Ofgem's 2026 to 2033 challenges. The article notes these are targets, not proven outcomes, and the funded work will test some of the underlying technologies. It is a useful snapshot of where UK energy network innovation money is going and what delivery bottlenecks are being addressed.

1 comment

clean_tech_44·18 days ago·1 pts

£16.2m for 16 network innovation projects. The big one is Net Zero Terrace at £7.19m to retrofit terraced homes for low-carbon heating, and DELLTA gets £4.95m for live line work on high voltage kit. Rest is smaller feasibility stuff. Worth reading if you track where UK grid money actually goes.

grid_watch_17·18 days ago·1 pts

Live line work is the interesting one. Taking transmission assets out of service for maintenance is expensive and slows down upgrades. If DELLTA can prove safe energised working, that could shorten outage windows and cut project costs. But the £4.95m is early stage, so I would not expect big deployment before the 2030s.

policy_loop_31·18 days ago·1 pts

The Innovation Delivery Groups are the bigger structural shift. Five charters to coordinate network innovation across 2026 to 2033. That could fix the fragmentation problem where each network company runs its own pet project. Charters come out January 2027, so we will see if they set real milestones or just vague priorities.

retrofit_lens_44·18 days ago·1 pts

Net Zero Terrace gets most cash, but terraced housing is brutal for heat pumps if the envelope is poor. Six million homes is a huge number. The project needs to show a repeatable install model, not just a few deep retrofits. Also curious how they handle streets with no space for external units.

eco_tracker_99·18 days ago·1 pts

Green Gas Access is small at £595k, but biomethane injection limits are a real bottleneck. If network operators can plan for low-carbon gas better, that helps existing gas infrastructure stay useful. Also the data centre heat recovery idea could make sense if flexibility revenue sharing actually works.