Ofgem has launched five innovation challenges under its £500 million Strategic Innovation Fund to accelerate development of the UK energy system.
The regulator said the challenges for the RIIO-3 price control period focus on improving customer outcomes and driving economic growth, with applications opening on 26 May 2026.
It added that the fund will support projects aimed at faster connections, lower costs, simpler systems and more resilient networks across the energy sector.
The five challenge areas include accelerating industrial connections, cutting network build times and costs, enabling plug-and-play domestic devices, eliminating outages and advancing decentralised system balancing.
The Strategic Innovation Fund supports the trial and deployment of new products, services and business models in the energy sector.
“I am delighted to endorse these Challenges on behalf of Ofgem. These Challenges matter because they represent the entire sector raising the bar,” said Marzia Zafar, SRO for the Strategic Innovation Fund at Ofgem.
“They signal clearly the collective ambition of senior leaders to work together to deliver a more resilient, more flexible and more consumer-focused energy system.”
Laura Sandys, chair of Energy Networks Innovation Taskforce, said: “These five highly ambitious challenges have been co-designed by over 150 organisations, with customers of the energy sector playing a significant role and should mark a fundamental change in how we shape and more importantly deploy network innovation at scale across the energy sector.”
“Meeting these challenges will reduce costs, unlock economic growth, and deliver a Net Zero energy system that meets the real needs of its users.”