The Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) hub in the UK has been awarded funding of £4m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to expand support for researchers across the country.
The new money is on top of the £5m received from EPSRC, when the hub was set up in July 2018.
The hub aims to bring together a network of academic, industrial and policy stakeholders to champion and maintain the UK’s wave, tidal and offshore wind expertise.
Extra money will now be made available through the hub’s Flexible Fund to provide grants of up the £100,000 to complement existing research, fill gaps or add cross cutting activities to explore the transfer of research findings between sectors.
Additional post-doctoral researchers will also be employed across the 10 partner universities, expanding the hub’s Early Career Researchers network.
More money will also be invested into the hub’s Research Landscape, an interactive database of ORE research taking place in universities and other organisations across the UK.
Supergen is led by Deborah Greaves, head of the School of Engineering and Computing, Electronics and Mathematics at the University of Plymouth, and includes academics from the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Exeter, Hull, Manchester, Oxford, Southampton, Strathclyde and Warwick.
Greaves said: “This additional investment is fantastic news and further recognition that offshore renewables have a vital role to play in the UK’s future energy generation.
“It will enable us to build on our existing ambitious programme of work, providing greater funds for early career and established researchers within the Supergen ORE hub.
“It also means we can offer more support to those from other institutions, strengthening the UK’s collective status as a world leader in this exciting and rapidly expanding field.”
EPSRC executive chair Lynn Gladden said: “Developing offshore renewable energy technologies is vital to the UK’s transition to a low carbon economy.
“Exploiting clean energy is a pressing need around the world, both in meeting rising demand and combating climate change.
“This additional funding for the Supergen ORE Hub will mean more institutions and researchers are able to apply themselves to producing solutions to the challenges we face in the energy sector.”