The Harwell Campus Energy Tech cluster, working with Tech Nation, has released a new report that explores the development of the energy tech ecosystem. It highlights the unprecedented growth in global investment in the energy tech sector in 2021 (at $22.2bn, a rise of 124 percent from the $9.9bn raised in 2020). Conversely it also identifies how challenging it is for innovative energy tech companies to thrive and mature to later stages of growth, due to the technical, political, legal and financial complexities of commercialising breakthroughs for use at scale.
The report identified that clustering organisations together provides opportunities for cross-fertilisation to occur organically, which, when combined with the right infrastructure, will provide the confidence for investors to support sustainable long-term projects that solve societal problems. Read the Emerging Energy Tech report here
Harwell’s Energy Tech Cluster brings together national institutions, such as the Faraday Institution, academia and industry to accelerate the rate of global innovation. In three years, the cluster has grown from 19 organisations to over 80 today and is a strong example of the benefits of clustering, where new insights from fields such as quantum computing and space tech are applied to energy tech. You can read the energy tech cluster strategy here which focuses on growing collaborative advantage to enable faster scale up for a wider range of organisations.
