IN Brief:
- The Ofgem Strategic Innovation Fund has awarded £22.9m to 18 energy network innovation projects.
- The latest awards include work on digital twins, robotics, local energy balancing, cyber resilience, and gas network planning.
- The funded projects reflect pressure from renewable integration, large new loads, flexibility, and distribution-level coordination.
Ofgem has awarded £22.9m through the Strategic Innovation Fund to support 18 energy network innovation projects.
Delivered with Innovate UK, the fund supports projects across discovery, alpha, and beta phases. The latest awards include £1m for eight discovery projects, £3.2m for seven alpha projects, and £18.7m for three beta projects.
The funded work spans electricity and gas networks. Northern Powergrid’s Fractal Flow project will develop a near-real-time digital twin to improve coordination and situational awareness across control rooms, while NESO-led work will examine quantum cyber-risk mapping for energy assets. Another project will develop a decision-support tool for gas transmission planning.
Other awards include RISE, led by SSEN, which uses robotics to support faster and safer network operations; Neighbourhood Watts, led by UK Power Networks, which focuses on local energy balancing; and AMPERES, led by National Grid, which will examine robotic seagrass planting around offshore grid infrastructure.
The spread of projects reflects how network innovation has moved beyond individual hardware trials. Electricity networks are now shaped by data quality, asset visibility, cyber security, automation, and the ability to manage local flows of power. Distribution networks originally designed around one-way supply are being adapted for solar, batteries, heat pumps, EV charging, flexible demand, and local balancing services.
Near-real-time digital twins sit at the centre of that change. A live model can help operators monitor asset loading, constraint risk, network topology, and available flexibility before problems become outages or connection limits. The value depends on accurate data, interoperable systems, and integration into control-room workflows without adding unnecessary operational complexity.
Cyber resilience is becoming equally important as operational technology, distributed assets, and remote control systems become more connected. Quantum computing risk may appear distant, but energy assets have long service lives and security decisions made now can remain in place for decades. The concern extends beyond headline cyber attacks into authentication, data integrity, communications resilience, remote access, and protection of distributed energy resources.
Flexibility is already changing market participation and network operation. As metered assets gain wider access to flexibility markets, networks need stronger systems for measurement, verification, dispatch, and settlement. Local balancing can defer reinforcement, but only where operators have reliable visibility of assets and confidence in response.
Robotics and automation offer a different route to improved performance. Inspection, vegetation management, asset assessment, and offshore environmental work can all expose workers to difficult or hazardous conditions. Robotic systems can reduce risk, improve data capture, and allow more frequent assessment of assets that are expensive or difficult to access manually.
The challenge for the Strategic Innovation Fund is not proving that individual technologies can work in controlled trials. The harder task is moving successful projects into routine network deployment, where procurement rules, regulatory incentives, data governance, workforce skills, and cyber requirements must all align. A digital twin, robot, or flexibility platform only changes system performance when it can be adopted at scale across real operating environments.
The latest awards show the direction of travel for network modernisation. Physical reinforcement remains essential, but the future grid will also depend on faster decision support, better asset intelligence, secure communications, and flexible local operation. Innovation funding is increasingly being used to build that operating layer before system complexity overtakes the tools available to manage it.
