UKERC Response to the BEIS Consultation Designing the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund

Abstract:

We welcome the announcement of the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund as part of the Government’s plans for boosting the productivity of the UK and maximising the advantages for UK industry of the global shift to clean growth.

We support the mission-oriented approach of the Industrial Strategy and the inclusion of a specific grand challenge on clean growth. Delivering this challenge will require a holistic approach from government that includes the following objectives (Busch et al., 2018)

• innovation in low carbon technologies, business models and practices;
• managing energy demand; and
• enabling systemic change.

The first of these objectives points to the need for industrial innovation to go beyond the purely technical and to encompass new ways of doing business and capturing value. The second includes the need for greater industrial energy efficiency, but goes beyond this to include the much larger opportunities that could be realised by changing the demand for the goods and services produced by industry (Scott et al., 2019). The third necessitates an economy-wide approach to decarbonisation in the UK to maximise synergies between sectors (e.g. increased use by industry of decarbonised electricity), while ensuring that action on climate change does not lead to carbon leakage outside the UK.

Download the full submission to read the response to the specific questions posed by the consultation.

Publication Year:

2019

Publisher:

UKERC

DOI:

No DOI minted

Author(s):

Taylor, P. and Watson, J