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In the Catapult Network’s Supercharging Innovation podcast, knowledge experts and leaders from the Catapult Network talk with some of the UK’s top industrial and academic leaders and parliamentarians to get their views on science, innovation and technology. Together, they are putting UK innovation under the spotlight and exploring the role of Government, businesses, the research community, private investors, and other innovative organisations in strengthening the economy through collaboration. Welcome to the Catapult Network’s Supercharging Innovation Podcast, subscribe now.
The Innovate UK Catapult Network provides a unique combination of cutting-edge R&D facilities and world-class technical expertise to support UK business innovation. Catapults are a critical element of Innovate UK’s portfolio of products and services, where the application of research is accelerated, and where new technologies are further developed, scaled up and realised. The Catapult Network is made up of nine world-leading technology and innovation centres with more than 65 national locations.
Hello and welcome to the second series of Catapult Network's supercharging innovation podcast. I'm Katherine Bennett, CEO of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and this year's chair of the catapult network. Our network is made up of world leading technology and innovation centers established and powered by innovate UK. This supercharging innovation series explores how the UK must break down barriers to solve national and global challenges and how this can be realized through the power of science, innovation, and technology. In the second episode of this series, our expert panel will be discussing how the nation can unlock exponential possibilities for our net zero future.
Katherine Bennett:In my sector, that of manufacturing, net zero solutions can be embedded into every part of the process. From powering and heating factories, to transporting goods to making existing components more efficient. Net 0 is changing the way we design, manufacture, and use aircraft and cars. But as exciting as our clean green future is, it's not as simple as just developing new technologies. It's about helping that tech to scale up, changing deeply embedded processes, ramping up inward investment, developing workforce and skills, and many other challenges besides.
Katherine Bennett:Today, you'll hear from some of our most knowledgeable experts across the catapults. Guy Newey, our deputy chair, Christina Garcia Duffy, and Katie Milne. We also have a very special guest joining us, right honorable Chris Skidmore, MP, who's the chair of the UK government's review on net zero. What are the toughest innovation challenges to get to a net zero future? How can government policy drive new technology?
Katherine Bennett:What are the roles for hydrogen, offshore renewable energy, and a whole systems approach? I'll pass over to Guy to get the discussion started.
Guy Newey:Thank you, Katherine, and welcome to this podcast. I am Guy Nui. I am chief executive officer of the Energy Systems Catapult, part of the Catapult network that, Catherine was just talking about, and this podcast is part of our supercharging innovation podcast series. Whilst there's lots of other exciting innovations happening across the economy, None, in my totally biased view, are as exciting or as important as a challenge of net zero and getting the UK to a net zero economy. The question we're gonna be grappling with today and look at different aspects of is, do we have all the technology, we need for net zero?
Guy Newey:Do we have all the widgets and different devices and generation technologies and supply technologies, which are gonna get us there? It's just a case of deploying them, or do we need a lot more invention and innovation in this sector? And we have got a fantastic panel to grapple with this issue. First of all, we've got Christina Garcia Duffy, who is the exec director at the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult. She leads there on technology strategy, product and service development, strategic partnerships.
Guy Newey:Of course, offshore renewable energy has been one of the great, UK success stories over the last few years, but there's plenty more to do that. So very welcome, Christina. We also have Katie Milne. Katie Milne is the program director of something called the Hydrogen Innovation Initiative, which Katie will talk about later and give much more detail. She is part of the high value manufacturing catapult, which is a network of 7 kind of mini catapults or some of them are not that many.
Guy Newey:We're grappling with various elements of the manufacturing opportunity and challenge. So, Katie, very welcome. And last but by no means least is the right honorable Chris Skidmore, MP, who is MP for Kingswood at least until the next election when Chris is, I think, sadly, stepping down as you've changed your mind, Chris, in the
Chris Skidmore:Kingswood's being stepping down from me. It's being abolished, so it's sort of I don't know where to go.
Guy Newey:Certainly be much missed, but hopefully as impactful on the outside as you have been on the inside. Chris obviously has held a range of ministerial positions since he became an MP, I think, in 2010. Most relevant for this is the brief of, minister for universities and science and innovation during that period. So would have been responsible at many levels for the budget that flows down to the catapult. So thanks very much for that, Chris.
Guy Newey:Also was famously the minister who signed net zero, the kind of commitment to decarbonize the British economy by 2050 into law in 2019. Gosh. It Seems a long time ago. And more recently, was asked by the then prime minister to, do the net zero review and did an extraordinary job of, I think, talking to every single person in the entire industry across, the United Kingdom within a short period of time and really galvanize the sector around his set of recommendations of what needs to happen for net zero, of which innovation was a crucial part of it. So brilliant panel to talk through, and you're very welcome.
Guy Newey:Right. First question, which we're gonna fire at Christina first of all. What do you think are the toughest challenges to get to a net zero economy? Cristina, over to you.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:2050 seems like a long way away, and it is not. And I'd say there's a balance of technologies and innovations that are already out there. They've been proven, and they're working, and then there's a bunch of all emerging technologies coming into play. And I think one of the most important challenges that we will be facing is accelerating the development.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:And in some cases, because taking complex and sophisticated technologies to the market takes a few years, sometimes even decades. So that acceleration will be crucial for us to get there In others, because the current economic status and situation is not very amenable for investment at this point in time, so there's not that investment flowing in as it has been in the last decade or so just because of the the state of the economy. Even when the technology is ready, deploying it at scale needed to reach net 0, it will require scaling up considerably, much more so that we've done in the past. And having the supply chain capacity to deliver that is going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks that we will see. Also, being able to manufacture and commission in mass amounts different types of equipment, different technologies, installing those is going to be great challenge.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:From an offshore wind perspective, I would say that building that capacity, you know, we have some targets of 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2,030 and some incentives until there After there, there's not much plan. There's no vision for 2050 and policies that will support the development and the delivery beyond that 2030. And that cuts across, as you know, Guy, in areas such as grid development and faster wind farm consenting. That takes about 5 years currently. So even if you launch projects now, we would not expect them to be built for another 7 or 8 years, and that's getting consenting approval and all of that.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:Supply chains is a bottleneck. And from the offshore wind perspective, ports, port development, port infrastructure, particularly in this country, is going to be tricky.
Guy Newey:And what's really interesting to hear is, well, you know, offshore wind has, as I said at the start, has been such a huge success story in the UK over the past 15 years, but all the things you're listing are challenges that we've still got to overcome battle with. What are some of the lessons that other sectors can take from the offshore wind sector sector in in terms of innovation? Because as you say, for many energy innovations, it takes decades before they're ready, and we don't have decades in many cases.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:Yes. I guess the speed of development, we are doubling the capacity of wind turbines every 10 years. And now every year, you get a new development, a 14 megawatts wind turbine, 16 megawatt. Now we're developing 18 megawatts. There's something around agility that is really good and can be learned.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:The flip side of that is that OEMs are not having the time to understand their products and produce 100 of these units. They produce a couple of 100 units, and then they're on to the next stage. And as we know, research and development, the nonrecurring costs of that are massive. And the status of the industry at this point, the major incumbent OEMs are seeing vast amounts of losses in their books over the last couple of years. It's just not being able to keep up pace.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:So if anything, I would say it's the opposite. It's how can offshore wind learn from more established sectors? At the end of the day, we've been around for 30 years or so. So there's lots we can learn from nuclear, from aerospace, from automotive.
Guy Newey:That's right. It's probably coming out of the teenage years almost, isn't it, in some ways? Yeah.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:It is. Yeah.
Guy Newey:Katy, what about you? What what do you think is the toughest challenge? What other things are are you excited about grappling with?
Katy Milne:Cristina was talking a little bit about scaling up and supply chain challenges. I mean, that is a that is a monster effort. Right? So I think we've got in most sectors, we've got deployable 1st generation technologies. It's certainly true in hydrogen.
Katy Milne:So we could deploy hydrogen carbon capture today. We can deploy electrolyzers today, but they're 1st generation technologies and they have a emergent supply chain. So we really really have to put in a lot of effort and innovation and engineering to scale up those supply chains, you know, get more rapid at manufacturing At the moment, they still have to compete, don't they, with the fossil fuel market. So I think At the moment they still have to compete don't they with the fossil fuel market. So I think it's those who think driving up scale and using it to drive down cost and into second generation technologies, scaled manufacturing processes.
Katy Milne:That's the thing that excites me, I suppose. That feels like a tough challenge. And the scale of that is frightening. You know, we've it's like the 1st industrial revolution all over again in terms of how exponential the growth needs to be, but we've got to do a teardown job at the same time. Right?
Katy Milne:So it's ramp down fossil fuels, ramp up and it's it's just pivoting entire global industries across all sectors in the course of 27 years and as Christina said it might feel that might feel far away but it doesn't when you think about the scale of the task for industry. I mean, we're particularly interested in the support for hard to abate sectors, and those are really the the transport sectors that are using high power densities. So things like, construction machines, you know, diggers, they really need high draw. They can't really run as well in battery electric all the way up to aircraft. So how do we decarbonize those those hard to bait transport modes?
Katy Milne:And then also industry, so places like the foundation industries, anywhere where you can't use electricity because it's not hot enough. High temperature processes, like, how are we going to replace heat and power in those sectors? We've got kind of big challenges on all fronts. Scale's a problem, need to drive down costs. But in addition, what are the roots to to net zero for these really hard to abate sectors?
Katy Milne:And and that's really where hydrogen plays in and and that is what the Hydrogen Innovation Initiative is trying to help make happen.
Guy Newey:Great. I mean, we'll talk about bit about that, later. Yeah. At least hard to abate sectors. You know, before Chris signed net zero into law, everyone was hiding in that last 20%.
Guy Newey:Everyone was saying, oh, well, don't worry. We'll we'll decarbonize buildings and the electricity system, but we'll get around to it, but we don't need to worry about it for a while. Whereas net zero is punishing in terms of its schedule, but the opportunity is absolutely huge. And, Katie, have you seen in the conversations you've had with those sectors which are described as far to abate probably unfairly, have you seen a kind of shift in the past 4 or 5 years that they're really seriously engaging with this with this
Katy Milne:Yeah. And and it's been amazing to see. I mean, Christina and I were both out of the aerospace industry, so she can talk to this as well as I as I can, but there's been a kind of 2 step shift in that sector specifically. So first of all, there was a big move to battery electric vehicles as kind of helicopter replacement. So for small vehicles, they refer to it as urban air mobility or air taxis.
Katy Milne:So that was happening, it's coming through to market now but more recently people have been looking at how do we decarbonize large commercial aircraft. Are we going to do that through synthetic fuels, sustainable aviation fuels or are we going to do that through hydrogen Or do we have to resort to outer sector abatements or direct air capture? You know? And the whole sector has come around that in the last few years, Sector commitments to net 0 2050. The big prime, the big multinationals are really investing at rates and governments around the world are supporting them.
Katy Milne:So to see that sector, you know, flying is famous for being polluting, right, seeing that sector really get on this, understanding the timelines of 2050 has been incredibly inspiring. And, honestly, for me as an engineer going into aerospace, it was quite incremental the stuff we were doing when I started my career. I was lucky I think because I was in materials so there's still some like, really exciting sexy engineering happening in that specific area, but otherwise that was incremental technology development. Now if you go into aerospace, the level of innovation is just off the charts. It's such an exciting place to be, and it's across the board, really.
Katy Milne:It's like best time to be an engineer since Brunel, that kind of period in time, really, I think.
Guy Newey:What a fantastic thing to hear, and that's certainly what the team, the energy systems Catapult are thinking across the Catapult network. We've got a lot of very excited engineers, which is means we've got half a chance of solving some of these challenges. Chris, what about you? When you've been thinking about this issue, you've been doing your review, what are the things that you think, oh, gosh. That's gonna be a tricky one to to overcome as a tough innovation challenge to face.
Chris Skidmore:Obviously, it will be easy to say the overall issue around grid capacity story. You know, the the general sort of nuts and bolts issue. Obviously, that was the number one mission of the the net zero review to have a sort of a grid mission. But what I actually want to focus on is not the supply side, but on the demand side because I think it's important when we put innovation in context, it must be user led. And Katie's obviously spoken about energy intensives, industries that through no fault of their own are traditionally very conservative.
Chris Skidmore:They only get one chance to do this, yes, right, and they can't sort of stop mid flow. You can't necessarily turn off the blast furnaces, and if it goes wrong, it's catastrophic. Understanding how innovation can fit within those who use these innovation, yeah, is absolutely critical. But the question is is that, you know, innovation will only succeed if households, those who are using electric vehicles, those who can see the purpose of having a heat pump, can actually sort of see the technology is working for them and not against them. So what I'm really keen to do is say, yeah, well, this is an exceptional transition because it's exceptional that we have to deal with the climate crisis.
Chris Skidmore:But actually, net zero is no different from any other transition, it's no different from, I think, don't be facetious, but, yeah, 11% So it's no different from, I think, don't be facetious, but, yeah, 11% of all households had a smart TV back in 2012. It's now 80% of all households. Obviously, there was a price point that came around, but also there was an innovation point around the obviously, the innovation bringing down the learning costs of the actual components as well, but also the technology was then proven to be far more efficient and and and generally easier to use. And so that's the challenge, I think, and this exciting challenge to demonstrate that, you know, net zero isn't going to just put in the too difficult box. This is a change that's gonna happen.
Chris Skidmore:Let's make the change something that people can embrace because they can see the hope and future for it. Batteries, you know, the big challenge around electric vehicles from a user perspective is how do we get these things to run further? How can we ensure we bring down the cost of the components so that the life cycle of the battery is longer than and less expensive than it will cost the car? How we ensure that that, yeah, means the secondhand car market is gonna work effectively with, you know, these batteries in place as well? So that's what I'm quite interested in focusing on is how the innovation relates to the demand side.
Chris Skidmore:And, you know, the net zero review had pillar 6 was net zero in the future. And that was very much focused on how can we create the policy frameworks by which we can allow innovation to thrive. It's when I was, you know, science minister often, it's like, give us the money. Yeah. We need the money.
Chris Skidmore:We want the triple tripartite helix of public funding versus private funding. But it's more complex than that. With, you know, with these new innovations, we need new regulations, more flexibilities to allow these to come on stream at the same time as existing technologies and to sort of segue in, rather than being sort of too disruptive.
Guy Newey:There's almost a sense of innovation, which is we'll sprinkle some money, often very significant sums of money, and we'll throw it out to institutions like Catapults and other research and technology organizations and universities and others like that. And then things will bubble up and then they'll just be deployed away. And, the offshore wind turbines of 18 gigawatts that Christina will talk. It'll just appear, and they'll be deployed in in the market. Is government thinking enough about that that journey as you discovered?
Guy Newey:Is it thinking enough about the barriers to deployment, which is as big an innovation challenge as as others?
Chris Skidmore:I think that the challenge is how do we ensure that things don't become victims of their own success? So once everyone lands on an identifiable, sort of, successful policy model, a framework, for scaling up, then they try to think that that is applicable to everything under the sun. So, you know, the CFD model, which everyone pats themselves on the back for, which has been incredibly useful and impact for offshore wind.
Guy Newey:Contract for difference, for those of the listeners who are not familiar with this, is kind of support mechanism for lots of renewable technologies.
Chris Skidmore:Everyone's now trying to create the CFD for hydrogen, CFD for CCUS, as if that is the gospel. And we've seen, obviously, from the latest sort of auction round with the sort of failure of offshore wind. I mean, ministers were told repeatedly that this was gonna happen, that they needed to reform the CFT. They needed to look at the wider supply chain sort of context around what do we mean by value, what do we mean about local content, and, obviously, that's now sort of an emerging thing that's happening in Europe as well with batteries. So the challenge is actually innovation within the civil service and government being agile and recognizing that time is moving fast.
Chris Skidmore:You know, in the States, there is an arsenal of of policy options in place. We don't just put all our eggs in one basket. And I think that's the challenge for innovation in the UK and it has been in the past when it comes to grants. With UKRI, we've had a grant process where, you know, endlessly people are having to sort of fill out applications for grants than spend a lot of time on this competitive element when we know we need these technologies anyway. And, yeah, we can't ever compete against, yeah, each other.
Chris Skidmore:So there are ways in which we've got to be, I think, more flexible in government to deliver on this. And also, the other thing about the net zero review is that stability, certainty, clarity, consistency, and making sure we don't just try to endlessly reinvent the wheel. Yeah. So once we've got certain competitions, we've got grants that have been established, or even like the Catapult network. Yeah.
Chris Skidmore:Know, when I was a minister, there was a moment when it was slightly under review and I had to order another review of the catapult network to make sure it was working efficiently. You know, the Fraunhofer, in Germany works because it's been established for over 60 years, and it's just sort of been allowed to carry on. There was also a clarion call for, you know, making sure that, you know, when we have certain institutional structures, we try to also continue to have that stability as well.
Guy Newey:You won't hear any dissent on that last point, Chris, from us in the Catapult network. And, you know, one of the really positive things over the last these last few years is we seem to have got past that stop start kind of, you know, commitment over 5 years, which is fantastic and allows us to plan and work with industry to really deliver on that. Christina, just picking up that last point. Obviously, you know, we were recording this relatively recently after, as Chris said, we had an auction which for offshore wind in particular, which has been the kind of workhorse over the last kind of 5 or 6 or the last 10 years really in terms of decarbonization, was unsuccessful for those people who are unaware of this because the kind of minimum price that the government set in the auction was not at the appropriate level. What do we learn from that in terms of that policy framework that is needed?
Guy Newey:And what what is the industry hoping for that will continue beyond 2030 as you see it?
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:You can imagine we've been having fairly open conversations over the last few weeks after the auction round 5 results. It is about the cost. It is the fact that there's been a track record of reducing the cost of fixed bottom offshore wind for the last 10 years, and it gets to a point where we found more reliability on the wind farms over longer periods of time, it no longer becomes economically viable for the developers to bid into the auction rounds. And that's what's happened. I guess from an industry perspective asking government, and we've had plenty of conversations, to be more agile, to understand.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:And perhaps it's been a situation of government thinking, well, it may be a bluff or it may be a glitch for a couple of years where the economy is not doing so well. And eventually, you know, the CFPs are for 15 years, so we will get something through the door. And from the industry perspective, it's given government a wake up call to say, we can no longer do this. We can no longer reduce the cost because, you know, one of the developments that has just been halted, they've seen increase in their costs of 40% because it's across everything, your materials, your supply chain, your logistics. So how can you bid for new work if you're seeing that cost increase?
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:And I think there's 2 mechanisms. So there's the CFD associated with launching ensuring that there's that amount of capacity, which is great, even greater if it gave longer term stability. What happens in many cases is the developers go around, bid for these options, and then they think about the supply chain. Then they think about which wind turbines am I going to source. And they give the wind turbine providers a couple of years of notice.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:If we had more stability and longer windows in the CFD where there's more time to do, that would provide the supply chain with order books that extend 7 or 8 years instead of 2 or 3 years, which is in kind what happens with aerospace. The order books are very stable, very long term. That gives stability for the supply chain to know there's a pipeline, and they can invest in innovation and technology.
Guy Newey:Yeah. Totally understood. What about Chris' challenges? Government has a success story, and suddenly, the answer to any problem is let's have a CFD. But what about a technology like floating offshore wind, which is in the earlier stage, obviously, huge market potential because you're not restricted by kind of shallow seabeds in the same way.
Guy Newey:How should policy makers think about the innovation, you know, innovation like floating offshore, or should they just use it, the CFT hammer as it were again?
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:What I'd like to see for floating offshore wind, obviously, they're part of 2 different pricing. Again, no results this time on AR 5. We need to look at the cost reduction pathways for floating offshore wind and put appropriate, administrative strike prices for that bucket that are, strike prices for that bucket that are perhaps a little bit higher than now. I would love to see, large scale publicly funded offshore wind innovation programs, particularly around floating offshore wind. We have a couple of floating offshore wind farms already.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:They're about 50 megawatts, a 100 megawatts, so just a few units. It would be brilliant to have open access offshore demonstration parks where we can test the technologies. There's plenty of innovation there around different floating structures, whether they're steel or cement. There's moorings, anchorings. There's a massive opportunity for the UK to transfer the knowledge we have in oil and gas, particularly into floating offshore wind because there's masses of experience there.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:And it's an opportunity as well for the UK to not be out of it, to be more in it and have a larger UK content in floating than what we've had in fixed up to now. So it's, you know, lots of activities beyond the CFD, particularly around that large scale innovation program and demo sites.
Guy Newey:It's moving on from floating offshore wind to another super exciting technology. And, Katie, I'm gonna come over to you. The role of hydrogen in a net zero future, have you been around this game as long as I have? Lived through 1 hydrogen hype cycle in the kind of pre 2010, and we've definitely over the last few years lived through another one. Be really interested in you telling us about, the Hydrogen Innovation Initiative, but also how you see the role of hydrogen in a future economy, because it's one of the most controversial and disputed parts of the future economy.
Katy Milne:I think what's not disputed though is that we need solutions for these hard to abate sectors, you know, that we're talking about previously. And and there's no silver bullets, are there? But hydrogen is a high potential candidate with understood technology solutions and engineering pathways to deployment for several of those hard to abate sectors. So whether it's as a feedstock into ammonia which makes our fertilizers, Currently we get hydrogen for that from fossil fuels, believe it or not, by a process called steaming and reforming, whether it's as a fuel source which is burnt in aeroplanes, in diggers, whether it's as a feedstock for synthetic fuels, clean green synthetic fuels or whether it's as part of a manufacturing process either to create heat or to produce glass, hydrogen can do all these things. Now it's not without challenges, but 1st generation tech is ready for multiple routes for producing hydrogen.
Katy Milne:It can be deployed at scale but we need to do that massive ramp up thing that I was talking about before. So that's where I see the role of of hydrogen. The Hydrogen Innovation Initiative, Initiative, so I mean hydrogen is not a sector, you know, in the same way that offshore renewable energy is now a sector, hydrogen bridges across 10 sectors, so we're in, you know, I've just listed a few of them on the end use but also energy networks, production, storage, distribution. So there's 10 sectors involved in either making, moving or using hydrogen. And the Hydrogen Innovation Initiative is a group of research centers who are mainly doing industrial research.
Katy Milne:So we're not academia, we're doing industrial projects and we've come together, bring together our networks and our industrial partners from across all these sectors to say, look, we need to think about where we can effectively think of these as cross sector challenges. I sit on the Jet Zero Council 0 emission flight delivery group. They're worrying about where's the hydrogen coming from, but so is automotive and so is farming. So rather than thinking about that all separately, we're trying to bring these, communities together to create combined innovation programs and we've got big ambitions because we think the investment level needed for hydrogen and for the UK to win a large share of that potentially massive future global market is quite large and that we should really be going at it as an opportunity in the UK. Note we've got a lot of offshore wind.
Katy Milne:Christina, perhaps you can talk to this, but that means potentially that you need long duration energy storage in order to capture that electricity when it's overproducing. Hydrogen is one of the highest potential candidates for capturing that overproduction of hydrogen, so a vision of a future UK energy system might be that crucial mix of wind, nuclear for baseload and hydrogen to kind of match in between them. And once you've got it with our strong transport supply chain base, it kind of makes hydrogen and hydrogen supply chains a bit of a a no brainer as part of our future industrial strategy.
Guy Newey:The very definition of a kind of systems challenge to think through, which obviously gets the team at the energy systems catapult absolutely excited. And just to give listeners a kind of sense of scale, correct me if I'm wrong, Katie, on this, the UK hydrogen demand at the moment is probably 25 terawatt hours a year, and none of that or very small amount of that is clean hydrogen in in a sense. It's kind of conventional, traditional dirty hydrogen, so so created in a way that that releases CO 2. And our modeling of energy systems catapult would say, in order to meet those kind of hard to abate sectors, you're talking about a low carbon or zero carbon hydrogen economy of 250, 300 terawatt hours. So an entirely new energy economy, sector of the economy, about the same size as the current power system in no time at all.
Guy Newey:So the opportunity opportunity and think about that globally is absolutely massive, but where do you use it in the most targeted way is a really big challenge. Just to come back on one area, as you talk about the hard to abate sectors, hydrogen is often seen as as the answer to to some of those. Are there alternatives equally being explored that may chip away at hydrogen's role in in that? Is it kind of race between different technologies, or is actually just the fundamental physics in some of these areas means it's gotta be something that's kind of gas based?
Katy Milne:It's a mixture, right, of those 2. So where you need hydrogen as a feedstock in a chemical process, you need it. And as a minimum, we have to convert the current gray hydrogen that you're talking about from fossil fuels to green. Just doing that will create a whole new new sector and new chain. But there's also applications where, yes, it might not be hydrogen.
Katy Milne:It's one of the it's probably a very high potential candidate because, I mean, this might feel odd to people, but our technology for hydrogen has actually been around for quite a long time. 1st gas turbine was burnt using hydrogen. Rowan Atkinson the other week, was driving a hydrogen car around, around a racetrack. We've had fuel cells for decades now, so it's really just been about, because we had fossil fuels, hydrogen wasn't used, if that makes sense. Like fossil fuels have got large advantages over hydrogen in terms of their ease of movement and the the volume that they take up in storage, but hydrogen is a good second best because it's very energy dense.
Katy Milne:So I think, yes, there is some uncertainty. So an aviation is and I mean transport is the the area I know best and where I know what the the options are. So as an example, will we in future run diggers from hydrogen where we burn it in an internal combustion engine and then capture any like, allow the walls to come out the back and capture the NOx? Or by NOx, I mean nitrous oxide. Or will we create synthetic fuels from biomass or from, like, chemical processes where you combine carbon and hydrogen, you know, but I think what those sectors are saying, the transport sectors that are harder to abate, they're saying okay we might not use hydrogen on the vehicle, That is uncertain.
Katy Milne:We need to develop and mature the technology to do that, but we will definitely need hydrogen even if we use these synthetic fuels because it's a key feedstock. So they use language like hydrogen is around the corner. Whichever way we turn, we're gonna need more clean, low carbon, 0 carbon hydrogen. So there is no doubt that the demand Yeah. Is gonna increase.
Katy Milne:The question is, how much? Is it 3 times? Is it 10 times? And that's the chain.
Guy Newey:Chris, in your in your odyssey around the country chatting to everyone linked to net zero kind of challenge or cohort as it were, you would have been pushed every which way on hydrogen and the role of hydrogen in the future economy. How do you reflect on that and the key areas of innovation?
Chris Skidmore:Obviously, we have lots of wrap tables, and actually, sometimes I'd sit back as chair and listen to everyone have it out over sort of certain areas of, technological certainty or or uncertainty. Obviously, hydrogen for heating was one of those where, you know, various different sub sectors of customer interest would be sort of going at each other around how we need to remain technologically agnostic. And I think there is an important challenge there to be set around innovation, which is obviously that interface between, yes, of course, you know, we want agnosticism, then we don't wanna rule out any technologies. But where the evidence begins to weigh itself to a certain point where actually trying to keep everything on the table is just disruptive and a waste of taxpayers' money. We've got to be able to come with a better framework than rather just waiting on sort of vested lobby interest to help decide this.
Chris Skidmore:You know, we do need almost like a new treasury green book when it comes to net zero innovation that's actually gonna say this, you know, is going to deliver and and create value for money. And there there is a value for money argument, I think, you know, as well as a technological one. That It means that we are going to probably have to close off, you know, certain sort of technologies at some point and say, I'm sorry. You know, you've had enough time to develop your case, and you simply haven't made it. At the same time, you know, the the challenge is also one of geography and taking a place based approach, as I know the energy systems catapult has done a lot of work on this in the past, you know, with your local air energy planning.
Chris Skidmore:You know, you have greater certainty by knowing more about what you need to know in order to develop the landscape, which the technologies can then be used and be fit that purpose. So, you know, that needs to happen at the same time, and and particularly around your hydrogen and, you know, looking at industrial decarbonization. One of the reasons why I believe in a mission based approach is partly, obviously, we need that long term certainty. When a mission should also come long term stable funding streams, and we see the government's committed that, and nuclear has partially committed that to CCUS. It should commit that to hydrogen.
Chris Skidmore:You know, it's not fair, you know, in this global net zero race that Germany has a hydrogen strategy that has £10,000,000,000 over 10 years, where we've still got a hydrogen innovation fund of £243,000,000 and no certainty after the next 3 years about what might happen. You know, we've got these distant targets of 10 gigawatts, 5 gigawatts worth of electro electric sort of hydrogen, and that's great. But, you know, if you need the money, like, the certainty of the funding behind that to unlock private investment, yeah, as well. And what I would say is that, you know, there's some fantastic work going on in high net, you know, whether it's Acorn, the cluster, or in Haul, and, you know, they're all competing against each other in a way that is a bit unhelpful, I think, sometimes. You know, we've created that artificial structure.
Chris Skidmore:But, also, going around the country, it doesn't really tackle the issue of disperse sites. You know, we've talked about cement works. We've talked about there are a number of industrial sites that don't have access to geologic storage. You know, they they aren't in an industrial cluster, and we put them to aside as sort of poor relation. And we really need to get on with thinking far more innovatively about where is hydrogen going to be transported, stored, and how do we create those networks, which, yeah, we've not really taken that work forward at the pace that we need to.
Guy Newey:That role for really thinking about the planning of this economy fits absolutely with some of the points Christina was making about certainty and, other areas, and that's gotta happen at different granularity. It's gotta happen locally as we've argued. It's gotta happen nationally, etcetera. You gotta create a space for innovation, but you're you're gonna have to plan the way this work. Right.
Guy Newey:Final comments from the panel. I'm gonna go around, and I'd like people to just say which innovations they are most excited about as well as anything that they wanna capture from the discussion. I'm gonna start with Christie. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the offshore and renewables No.
Cristina Garcia-Duffy:No. An innovation I'm most excited about. We've talked about hardware a lot on different energy vectors and others today. When the hardware is developed and it's installed and everything is operating, what I find most exciting is the opportunities afforded by the widespread use of digital technologies, robotics, and autonomous systems, and how they are going to help us operate these assets through time and do it efficiently and do it reliably going forward. And that calls across any of these measures that we've talked about today, and that's what makes them exciting for
Guy Newey:me. Really good one that links to Chris's point about, thinking about the demand side and the integrate. How all this stuff is gonna fit together and the role of digital technologies is something, certainly, where the energy systems catapult get super excited about. Katie, what's top of your list?
Katy Milne:The UK has world leading competency, like, really, really world leading competency in measurement and testing. Right? It's it's not only in terms of the development of the sensors and the imaging technology, but also in terms of the digital tech and analytics that you use to kind of apply and make it intelligent. And I think when we are moving to this new world, you know, there's an opportunity that those sense that sensing technology, that monitoring becomes much, much more pervasive on these cars, and the new new world of the future. So we have this almost this pervasive sensing world, this world that's a bit more like a human body, you know, that self monitoring, self healing, self adapting.
Katy Milne:And for me, that is the thing that's most exciting. And Britain is one of the best countries in the world at it, and we should really go at that measurement, testing, thing, asset management piece like like, there's no tomorrow.
Guy Newey:And, Chris, what gets you excited about the the the future?
Chris Skidmore:I'm gonna go more to the domestic context here because buildings make up the 2nd largest amount of our emissions, 24, 25 percent. Yet the innovation that has taken place in buildings and construction, it's been pretty static for the past sort of 50 years. And now, because of net zero, that has woken up, as Katie said, a hugely exciting time to be an engineer, but also in construction and the materials for the future, but also the humble air source heat pump. Because, you know, when you look at boilers, okay, we've had the innovation of the condenser boiler, but but because we thought that was all that was needed, no one ever really, you know, thought very closely our innovation in in heating systems. And now and I know, Guy, you've done work on this in Birmingham.
Chris Skidmore:We're looking at room based sort of heating, thermostatic temperatures. You know, it was a revolutionary idea that everyone, you know, had this central heating system in in the sixties. Every room was heating the same temperature. Yeah. It's now gonna phenomenally change things.
Chris Skidmore:People will have rooms heated to different temperatures, but also gonna have air source heat pumps that their condensers are gonna fit into the same space as a condenser boiler. I've seen these things being manufactured. They haven't been sort of come out in the public realm yet. You know, you haven't been released yet, but we are on a cusp, I think, a tipping point where just like I said with smart TVs, we are going to see the technology of the heat pump really sort of come to the fore, and people are gonna realize how effective these things are in terms of the coefficients and actually how little energy they use compared to gas boilers. So that's where I'm most excited to see.
Chris Skidmore:Like, I just know that in 5 years' time, the world is gonna be a very different place in terms of the products that'll be on the market.
Guy Newey:Indeed. Right. We will have to stop it there. Thank you. Huge, warm, massive thank you to the panel.
Guy Newey:We have touched on a huge range of issues, the reality of how long energy innovation in our system takes, decades, the importance of the policy context, everything from giving clarity to the place based activity. This really important point that this innovation is not just about hardware. This is about consumer offerings. It's about, crucially, this collision of digital and energy, which such an exciting space. And a huge thank you to my panel for touching on all of those issues.
Guy Newey:This has been the Catapult Network's supercharging innovation series. I hope you can join us for some other ones. And now over to Catherine to finish us off.
Katherine Bennett:Thank you, Guy. I really enjoyed this discussion, which explored so many challenges, particularly how the UK must rapidly ramp up net zero solutions while simultaneously reducing reliance on fossil fuels and all in a very short timeline. We also heard how the UK is world leading in measurement and testing, how domestic heating can revolutionize UK homes, and how digital technologies can inform our next steps towards a net zero future. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Catapult Network Supercharging Innovation podcast powered by innovate UK, Available wherever you get your podcasts. If after listening to this episode, you have questions, suggestions, or simply want to tell us your thoughts, get in touch with us via social media through our website catapult.org dotuk or via your podcast app.
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